An eighth BJP candidate on Thursday filed his nomination for the Rajya Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh, setting the stage for a contest with the Samajwadi Party on February 27.
Hemant V Shivsaran/Rediff.com does a deep dive and lists the winners with the highest and lowest margins in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
Jammu and Kashmir BJP chief Ravinder Raina, seeking re-election from Nowshera assembly constituency of Rajouri district in Jammu and Kashmir, is facing a major challenge from his former party colleague Surinder Choudhary.
The share of candidates who were successful among the BJP was 56.5% in 2019. It was 5% for the Congress.
He said he would continue to support the ruling coalition.
She said she would remain ever ready as usual to pursue the humanitarian missions of sants, gurus and great men, born in the Dalit, Adivasi and other backward classes from time to time.
The withdrawal of the candidature by DPAP leaders on the last day on August 30 is seen as a boost to the NC-Congress alliance.
The electoral exercise, the first since the Lok Sabha elections, will decide the fate of many veterans and some debutantes including Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu's wife Kamlesh Thakur.
Political parties and leaders wait with bated breath for the Haryana and Jammu-Kashmir assembly poll results on Tuesday.
'Unless she joins one of the coalitions, she has a bleak future.' 'The NDA option is suicidal, but INDIA could help her.'
Mayawati on Sunday had directed Mahesh to vote in favour of the Kumaraswamy government, after he had said that he would skip the trust vote in the absence of any clear instructions from the high command.
The youth -- their dreams of government jobs unfulfilled -- are voicing their frustration.
The opposition parties on Sunday slammed the move to hire public servants through lateral entry, claiming it will snatch reservations from SCs, STs and OBCs, but the Bharatiya Janata Party hit back stating the National Democratic Alliance government was bringing transparency to this mode of recruitment started by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.
The BSP chief said Uttar Pradesh, which is India's largest state, will decide who will be the next prime minister.
The ruling party is worried as the alliance represents over 50 per cent of the state's population, reports Virendra Singh Rawat.
BSP legislators were earlier supporting the Ashok Gehlot government from outside and were in constant touch with the chief minister.
The Bharatiya Janata Party on Sunday declared 13 candidates from Uttar Pradesh for the Lok Sabha polls including actor Arun Govil, who played Lord Ram in popular TV serial Ramayan, from Meerut, while replacing sitting MP Varun Gandhi from Pilibhit with state minister Jitin Prasada.
BJP will find it tougher to push contentious Bills, especially those that would require Constitutional amendments, without the support of its allies and cooperation from the Opposition.
"The day news of the SP-BSP top leadership meeting came out, the BJP government used the CBI and raids were conducted in an old mining scam and the news of quizzing Akhilesh Yadav was deliberately spread. Is it not an action to defame the SP-BSP alliance?" Mayawati said.
The best-case scenario is that the BJP will top out at around 50 seats in UP -- a drop of 12 from the 62 it had won in 2019. Taken in tandem with Maharashtra and Karnataka, this is what is likely to put paid to the BJP's ambitions of a third term for Modi, argues Prem Panicker.
Mayawati said that in case of a tie-up with the Congress in the past, the party did not benefit.
The brothers were booked under the UP Gangsters Act in connection with the murder of the then BJP MLA from Ghazipur, Krishnanad Rai, on November 29, 2005 and the kidnapping-murder of Varanasi-based trader Nand Kishore Rungta in 1997.
Ali said the JD-S did not have a large organisational structure in Uttar Pradesh, which sends most lawmakers to the Parliament.
On the eve of the counting of votes in Rajasthan, both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress have started reaching out to independent candidates, including rebels, and smaller parties.
She accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of being 'anti-Dalit' and recalled the Una incident and the death of Dalit scholar Rohit Vemula to back her assertion.
The Congress said the alliance between the BSP and Jogi's Janta Congress Chhattisgarh has the support of the BJP, which is ruling the state since 2003.
Capping its impressive showing in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, the Bahujan Samaj Party also swept the three Lok Sabha bypolls for Mirzapur, Robertsganj and Bilhaur.
Madhya Pradesh assembly polls have recorded a voter turnout of 77.15 per cent, which is 1.52 per cent higher than in 2018, as per the latest data released by the Election Commission of India.
Earlier this month, there were speculations that Nath might switch over to the BJP, but he refuted such reports as "creation of media."
Ramesh Meena, who was among those BSP legislators who made the switch to Congress, said: "The chief minister should honestly tell how much money was paid to us when we joined Congress and left the the BSP in the last Congress government."
Swati said that she had lodged an FIR against the "misdeeds" of BSP workers led by Naseemuddin Siddqui "at the behest of Mayawati".
A statement from the Congress said the party's disciplinary committee decided to suspend Kumbhani after a thorough discussion, adding it had come to the conclusion that the nomination form was rejected due to gross negligence on his part or "in connivance with the BJP".
The meeting comes a day after Danish Ali faced verbal abuse from BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri in Lok Sabha.
Earlier, when reporters asked Nath about his party's strategy for the elections in the central Indian state, he had said the party had not started talks of alliance with anyone.
Local Congress workers, led by city unit's working president Dinesh Savalia, staged a protest outside Kumbhani's locked house in Puna Gam area, calling him traitor and accusing him of giving a walkover to the BJP.
She said neither the Congress nor the BJP works in the interests of the upper castes' poor and the remaining majority.
Faced with one of the worst showing in the Lok Sabha polls, Bahujan Samaj Party supremo and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati on Tuesday dissolved all the committees of the party.
Suspended Congress leader Nilesh Kumbhani, whose nomination form was rejected over discrepancies leading to Bharatiya Janata Party winning the Surat Lok Sabha seat in Gujarat unopposed, resurfaced on Saturday after 20 days and alleged it was the grand old party that had betrayed him first in 2017.
Congress today received a shot in the arm in its bid to revive the party in Uttar Pradesh with a former Bahujan Samaj Party Rajya Sabha member joining it.
Hitting back at Bharatiya Janata Party Chief Amit Shah after he needled her on desertions in the Bahujan Samaj Party, former chief minister Mayawati on Sunday said his "childish" remarks betrayed BJP's nervousness ahead of assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh.
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