'We have already directed our party members and supporters and advised them that not a single vote goes to the BJP'
The swearing-in ceremony was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP national president J P Nadda and several other top leaders of the NDA.
The Union home minister said that on November 15, a grand celebration will be held at the 'Statue of Unity' to mark the birth anniversary of tribal icon Birsa Munda.
The National Democratic Alliance was set to sweep the Bihar assembly polls, surging ahead in over 200 of 243 seats on Friday with the Bharatiya Janata Party emerging as single largest party with about 90 per cent strike rate, reaffirming the popularity and campaign clout of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was the face of the ruling alliance through the poll battle in the highly sensitive political state.
The Assam Police have issued notices to opposition parties 'ordering' them to 'withdraw' the hartal over the implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and warned that 'legal action' will be taken against them if they fail to follow the diktat.
The saffron party won 60 of the 126 seats, its allies Asom Gana Parishad nine and United Peoples Party (Liberal) six. Congress bagged 29 seats, its partner All India United Democratic Front 16 and Bodo Democratic Front four.
Radical Islamist networks are deliberately targeting Muslim youths embedded within the country's professional and academic ecosystems, leveraging their skills, mobility, and digital reach to quietly strengthen operational capabilities. This trend highlights a dangerous evolution in terror recruitment -- one that exploits ideological faultlines, online echo chambers and transnational radical Islamist influences to attract individuals who outwardly embody India's modern and aspirational narrative, points out Dr Kanchan Lakshman.
If he cannot do it this term by using his bureaucracy and experts from different fields, it will be a tragedy, asserts Ramesh Menon.
Left to its machinations, the BJP would have loved to cut Nitish down to size, but it can't afford to do so as the JD-U is in alliance with the BJP at the Centre, and cannot form a government on its own in Bihar. For now, both need each other: Nitish for legitimacy, the BJP for numbers, points out Ramesh Menon.
The party is less forthcoming about who the chief minister will be if it stays in power.
The juggernaut of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance, which triumphed in three of the four east and north-eastern states that went for assembly bypolls on Saturday, was halted yet again in West Bengal where Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress registered a six-on-six clean sweep.
A 14-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped by three persons in Assam's Nagaon district, triggering massive protests by people on the streets.
Members of the Congress and AIUDF, protesting against a Cabinet decision to repeal the Assam Muslim Marriages and Divorces Registration Act, 1935, staged walkouts later.
Several leaders of the BJP and its allies are of the view that the NDA this time is unlikely to follow the instincts that made it pick Dhankhar and will be more conventional in its search for his successor.
The BJP's MoSha leadership are past masters in encouraging defections from their allies if it helped their party capture the chief minister's chair. In Bihar, they are not sure if JD-U MPs and MLAs would be willing to cross over to the BJP if the Nitish leadership came on top -- and the NDA crossed the halfway mark together, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
The 12-hour Assam bandh called by the All Assam Minority Students' Union (AAMSU) on Tuesday turned violent with government officials and mediapersons attacked leading to imposition of indefinite curfew in some areas.
"Around 20 candidates have been shifted to Jaipur from Assam today," said Congress chief whip in the Rajasthan assembly, Mahesh Joshi.
Shah said the ULFA, the oldest insurgent group of Assam, agreed to abjure violence, disband the organisation and join the democratic process.
The senior Congress leader opined that the situation in Assam can now be divided into two phases -- pre-CAA and post-CAA, and it was necessary to unite all anti-CAA forces in order to protect the ethos of the Assam Accord.
'The continuous and mysterious praise of the BJP and the chief minister by AIUDF leadership and senior members have affected the public perception of the Congress party'
>The Indian Army still uses old British-era names and recruits soldiers based on caste or region, which hurts national unity, argues Colonel K Thammayya Udupa (retd).
The government of India has signed a peace agreement with a tribal insurgent group from Assam, United People's Democratic Solidarity.
Dismissing his Assam counterpart's claim, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on Tuesday asserted in the assembly that Mukroh village on the disputed inter-state border, where a violent clash claimed six lives last year, is a part of the hill state.
Gam secured 67,242 votes against Basumatary's 25,101 while the third candidate, Bhaity Richong of the Socialist Unity Centre of India-Communist, got 2,265 votes.
The BJP won both the Rajya Sabha seats from Assam.
Yadav, during his first visit to Guwahati, said he has already spoken to Congress and will hold talks with the All India United Democratic Front later in the day to formalise the alliance.
A railway engine driver abducted by a little-known tribal outfit called United Democratic Liberation Army, from a remote area in Hailakandi district in southern Assam last month, was released unharmed by the abductors on Friday much to the relief of the Railway authorities and his family members.
Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and his Nagaland counterpart Neiphiu Rio held closed door interaction with NSCN (IM) chief negotiator Thuingaleng Muivah at Dimapur on Tuesday, a government official said.
Former women militants are being trained in making sanitary napkins by the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) administration, with commercial production of a unit expected to commence soon.
A joint team of the army and police gunned down seven tribal militants on Friday morning in an encounter inside a dense forest along the Assam-Mizoram border in Karimganj district of South Assam.
Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma added to the mystery by declaring only that the next CM would be from the BJP, without naming Sarbananda Sonowal, the CM of the outgoing government.
A total of 246 militants of United Gorkha People's Organisation and Tiwa Liberation Army formally surrendered before Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma in Guwahati on Thursday.
'Talking about boycotting polls is simply a move to galvanise party leaders, workers, and supporters for the big political fight.'
The shocking molestation incident -- when a girl was abused and assaulted on the streets of Guwahati in full public view -- rocked the Monsoon Session of the Assam Assembly.
10 vacancies in the Upper House after Rajya Sabha members were elected to the Lok Sabha.
The Assam United Democratic Front, a conglomeration of minority political groups, has decided to field a young Adivasi woman, who had hit the headlines in 2007 after being brutally assaulted in Guwahati, as one of its candidates for the forthcoming Lok Sabha election in Assam.The AUDF, led by perfume tycoon Badaruddin Ajmal, will field Lakshmi Orang from the prestigious Tezpur constituency in north Assam.
'The message has gone loud and clear (among the people of Assam) that the BJP is only interested in polarising (the country) and they are basically interested in (capturing votes in) the Hindi heartland and they don't bother much about rest of India.'
The proposed population control policy will, however, not be applicable in all the schemes in Assam immediately as many of the benefits are offered by the central government, Sarma said at a press conference in Guwahati.
In the first incident of poll-related violence on the eve of tomorrow's second phase of polling in Assam, two persons have been killed in Kokrajhar district.
The Nationalist Congress Party would not ally with the Congress in the north-east for the Lok Sabha polls, its senior leader Purno Agitok Sangma said in Shillong on Monday.
