The TDP and JD-U will have a lot to answer inside Parliament, day after day, session after session, notes N Sathiya Moorthy.
"You have no right to take laws into your own hands. At the same time, you don't have the right to hurt the sentiments of others", the vice president said.
The most important lesson is that you have to build your political proposition, and sell it yourself. You can't leave it to the courts, media, NGOs and civil society and expect them to play the role of the Opposition. That's precisely what Mr Modi's challengers have been doing and we know the results, notes Shekhar Gupta.
This time Modi has no emotive message to take to the stump. Muscular nationalism doesn't work against the backdrop of China's successive inroads into Indian territory. Rising prices is a sore point that cuts across class and caste barriers; unprecedented levels of unemployment has the youth in a ferment. This has reduced the BJP campaign to a laundry list of recycled grievances and thinly veiled communal appeals, neither of which are working as well as they have in the past, argues Prem Panicker.
Thakur's tenure as chief minister is best remembered for implementation of the recommendations of the Mungeri Lal Commission, whereby quotas for backward classes were introduced in the state in 1978. This panel was the forerunner of the Mandal Commission. Both Mungeri Lal and B P Mandal were from Bihar, which has a long history of socialist struggles.
His five-year rule saw the Babri Masjid demolition, the rise of the saffron forces and also the country being placed firmly on a new economic path, away from the Nehru years of public sector socialism.
The Opposition's stand on the Ayodhya consecration is puzzling. Their only objection seems to be that the BJP has hijacked a religious event for political benefit. In saying this, the Opposition is either being naive or hypocritical, argues Jyoti Punwani.
'There is no scope for any doubt. This was a scheme designed to enrich the ruling party.'
She is well-known for her role in the television serial 'Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi'.
Will January 22 mark a point of no return for our Constitutional secularism? asks Shekhar Gupta.
At a time when the BJP's stars are at the top on the eve of the Lok Sabha polls, the Puri-Joshimath Sankaracharyas may have kick-started a row whose efforts might be to divide Hindus, not in the name of castes, but on what passes for greater belief, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
As the temple is inaugurated, unfortunately for Advani but unsurprisingly for the rest of us, the architect of the party's rise will not lead the ceremony and claim credit for his achievement, notes Aakar Patel.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is unelectable and would make the country less safe, US Vice President Joe Biden said as he launched an unprecedented scathing attack to prevent the real estate billionaire to enter the White House next January.
Retail investors now own a bigger slice of small-cap companies than a couple of years earlier, attributable to their growing conviction in mutual fund (MF) schemes focused on this space. Data from Capitaline shows MFs' average holding in the National Stock Exchange Nifty Smallcap 250 rising to 8.67 per cent, from 7.67 per cent in the past two financial years, with the number of companies with over 20 per cent MF holdings, rising from 15 to 24. At the end of May, the top five small-cap firms with the highest MF holdings were Carborundum Universal, Blue Star, Cyient, Gujarat State Petronet, and Cholamandalam Finance.
Kabir was seen clinging to the tricolour-wrapped coffin of his father. He bowed before his father's body just before cremation.
Bengaluru-based IT major Infosys is growing its footprint in the Nordics by establishing a new proximity centre in Oslo, Norway, as part of its continued expansion plans in the region. The new centre is expected to enable Infosys to attract, re-skill, and upskill local talent to work on global opportunities through next-gen technologies like cloud, AI, IoT, 5G, and software engineering. The Nordic region consists of five sovereign states - Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden - besides the three autonomous territories connected to these states: the Faroe Islands and Greenland (Denmark), and land (Finland).
'Vijaya Raje Scindia had assured the prime minister that nothing would happen to the Babri Masjid'
On one hand, South Indian states have been complaining about denial of a proportionate portion of the sharable funds from the Centre, based on population. On the other hand, they stand to lose Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha seats that again are based on population, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
'How can anybody cast aspersions on Sonia's family without any proof?' asks former prime minister V P Singh.
Bhairon Singh Shekhawats personal physician R S Rathore said his pulse rate and blood pressure were normal.
'Unfortunately these programmes were not taken seriously by the bureaucracy and they were put on the backburner,' Bhairon Singh Shekhawat said.
It's great to win election after election on the strength of Modi's charisma and voter appeal, but the larger the Modi myth grows, the more the BJP diminishes, notes Saisuresh Sivaswamy.
With over 80 million Unified Payments Interface (UPI) users, Amazon Pay, the payments business of e-commerce giant Amazon, has been growing at 40-50 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y), said Mahendra Nerurkar, chief executive officer (CEO) and vice-president (V-P), Amazon Pay India. "Leveraging just the micro peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions on UPI is not a business model. "While we have enabled those features, we do not chase monthly active users based on this.
Gianiji had crafted his moves with the meticulous planning of a chess grandmaster. He did not know whether a checkmate was feasible, as his time was running out, but he wanted Rajiv Gandhi to smell the fear of loss. A fascinating excerpt from K C Singh's The Indian President: An Insider's Account of the Zail Singh Years.
External Affairs Minister and senior Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh, Salman Khurshid, tells Kavita Chowdhury that the Bharatiya Janata Party is extending support to Narendra Modi out of sheer desperation, for the party sees in him a trump card to power.
As the Lok Sabha debates a no-confidence motion brought against the Narendra Modi government by the opposition, the 28th such motion to be admitted in the Lower House, data compiled by a think tank shows all previous ones have either been defeated or remained inconclusive.
The last rites will be performed by Sharad Yadav's son Shantanu Bundela, the late politician's nephew, Shailesh Yadav, informed.
He said that even the security of the Supreme Court would have been put to a serious risk if any untoward incident were to happen.
Key United Progressive Alliance ally Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam on Tuesday rejected the contention that the choice of candidate for the vice-Presidential poll was based on regional consideration.
'There was trust, but perhaps there was also this apprehension that given the supreme post of prime minister, Sonia Gandhi felt her authority may be a challenged.'
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Thursday declared the southern state as India's first fully e-governed state where an entire range of government services have been digitised so that they can be provided to the citizens promptly and transparently.
Vice President Hamid Ansari said that there is no shift in India's foreign policy and asserted that it is participation that matters as it is "not a conference of Prime Ministers".
'The ISI wanted to create internal disruption in the Valley by the killing of the security forces.'
Malik, who is in jail following his conviction and life sentence in a terror funding case, was brought to the high-security apex court premises in a prison van escorted by armed security personnel without the court's permission.
While Modi had a party and an organisation that supported him, all Mulayam, a self-made man with no inheritance in politics, had was a set of (fairly flexible) beliefs.
The BJP on Thursday alleged that the opposition parties have decided to boycott the inauguration of the new Parliament building by Prime Minister Narendra Modi just because it has been built at his initiative.
'He told senior journalists a few days after the Babri Masjid demolition, 'Jo hua theek hua. Maine isliye hone diya ki BJP ki rajniti hamesha ke liye khatam ho jaye.'
The move comes following the implementation of the 7th Pay Commission's recommendations which has created an anomalous situation in which the salary of the President is Rs 1 lakh less than that of the country's top-most bureaucrat, the Cabinet secretary.
According to sources, several opposition leaders are also considering boycotting the inaugural function on Sunday, alleging that the government has insulted the President.
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