Senior Janata Dal-United leader Dhananjay Singh pitched for Opposition unity ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and said party workers in Uttar Pradesh want Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to contest the elections from the state's Phulpur constituency.
Madhya Pradesh will see 243 candidates with criminal background in the forthcoming elections. Out of the 1,045 candidates analysed by the Association for Democratic Reforms, 243 or 23 per cent of the candidates have a criminal record.
Jailed gangster and former member of Parliament Atiq Ahmad and his wife on Tuesday joined the All India Majlis e Ittehadul Muslimeen in the presence of its chief Asaduddin Owaisi, drawing a sharp reaction from the Bharatiya Janata Party which said Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will not allow "Jinnah's jihadi mentality" to flourish in Uttar Pradesh.
Why is the police action being questioned, the Rajya Sabha MP asked.
Besides the national capital, polling for the sixth round of the marathon seven-phase elections will be held Saturday in 14 seats in Uttar Pradesh, all 10 seats of Haryana, eight seats each in Bihar and West Bengal, six seats in Odisha, four seats in Jharkhand and one seat in Jammu and Kashmir.
Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi will start the party's general election campaign in Uttar Pradesh next month from the Congress bastions of Kanpur, Jhansi and Bahraich.
Trinamool Congress leader Mahua Moitra's expulsion from the Lok Sabha triggered a political slugfest on Friday, with the opposition calling it a 'betrayal of India's parliamentary democracy' and the Bharatiya Janata Party asserting that it was an 'apt decision' as there was proof of the allegations levelled against her.
Madhya Pradesh will see 243 candidates with criminal background in the forthcoming elections. Out of the 1,045 candidates analysed by the Association for Democratic Reforms, 243 or 23 per cent of the candidates have a criminal record.
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.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Opposition Congress in Madhya Pradesh, where assembly polls are due by 2023-end, are not attaching much importance to the presence of the AAP and the AIMIM citing the largely bipolar politics of the state.
Amid the raging Israel-Hamas war, a group of opposition leaders, including MP Danish Ali and former parliamentarians Mani Shankar Aiyar and K C Tyagi, visited the Palestine Embassy in New Delhi on Monday to express solidarity with Palestinians.
Adityanath on the occasion praised the Centre's 'Agnipath' scheme and highlighted its benefits.
The Nishad Party is headed by Sanjay Nishad, the father of Pravin Nishad who had won the Gorakhpur parliamentary seat on an SP ticket in the 2018 by-polls.
As many as 28 out of 41 sitting women MPs, including Sonia Gandhi, Hema Malini and Kirron Kher, retained their seats in Lok Sabha.
The BJP tops the list with 43 (80 percent) of 54 MLAs each having declared assets valued at more than Rs 1 crore.
Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh on Thursday claimed that contrary to the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's "false propaganda" that the population of Muslim community was increasing in the country, the number of the minority community members vis-a-vis Hindus was fast declining, and added that he could prove it.
Although it saw a veritable who's who of the Oppostion leadership, the Samajwadi Party stayed away from the Iftar dinner hosted by Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Monday.
A report filed by the police with the district magistrate of Gautam Budh Nagar district recommended filing of first information report against the two leaders and also against Bahujan Samaj Party leader and former Minister Naseemuddin Siddiqui.
Bahujan Samaj Party Member of Parliament Dhananjay Singh, who was arrested along with his wife Jagriti Singh in connection with the murder of their maid, was on Friday denied bail by a Delhi court.
Harivansh, a Janata Dal-United MP, is likely to get the support of 126 members in the Upper House, which has an effective strength of 244 MPs, sources in the Bharatiya Janata Party said.
The April 11 polling will decide the fate of several political bigwigs.
Yadav struck deals with the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress whenever needed to form or save the governments led by him in Uttar Pradesh.
Talking about the brutal killing of Krishnaiah in 1994, G Uma Krishnaiah said her husband was killed for no fault of his.
Former Bharatiya Janata Party leader Swami Prasad Maurya on Wednesday said he was not going back to the saffron camp and indicated joining Samajwadi Party on Friday.
Often credited with his party's victory in the 2012 assembly polls, now 59, he became the youngest chief of the Shiromani Akali Dal, when he was elevated to the post in 2008.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday claimed that the Congress and Samajwadi Party will run a bulldozer over the Ram temple if elected to power, and asked them to take 'tuition' from Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath 'where to run bulldozers'.
Badal said farmers are braving the cold and waiting at Delhi's borders but the government's "eyes and ears are shut".
Polling in 70 constituencies began at 8 am and will conclude at 5 pm, except in nine polling booths in the Maoist-affected Bindranawagarh seat in Gariaband district, where voting began at 7 for security reasons, a poll official said.
Few in Varanasi expect the result to be different from 2014 and 2019. The only point of interest is whether Narendra Modi will increase his winning margin against his rivals.
The voting will begin at 7 am and end at 5 pm after the electioneering came to an end on Saturday, 48 hours before the electorate begin casting their votes.
The Congress's share has almost halved, down from 12 in 2014 to six now.
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has pinned its hopes on the old guard to ensure victory in next month's assembly elections in Chhattisgarh as it gave tickets to 11 sitting MLAs and renominated 13 leaders who lost in the 2018 polls.
'Episodes of targeted attacks on Muslims established that for a section of people and, sadly, even officials of the State, the election results conveyed no lessons.' 'Opposition parties must not be hesitant in speaking out whenever the mob with tacit State support targets Muslims,' asserts Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.
The seat got vacant after the death of Bharatiya Janata Party's Rajya Sabha MP Madan Lal Saini in June. Rajasthan has 10 Rajya Sabha seats.
Out of the 25 seats, five seats each are reserved for Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes.
It is likely that small parties would be given very few seats to contest, but these parties believe that they would be able to swing the result in favour of bigger alliance partners by transferring their vote bank.
The Bharatiya Janata Party returned to power in Rajasthan on Sunday, winning 115 seats out of the 199 where assembly elections were held last week.
The Samajwadi Party on Thursday announced Dimple Yadav as its candidate for Mainpuri parliamentary seat, which fell vacant after the death of party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav.
BJP sources suggest that the upcoming elections will likely revolve around the renewed enthusiasm for the temple unless another theme with religious and nationalist undertones emerges.
Only vegetarian dishes were served at the official dinner held at a state-run five-star hotel.
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