Violence had rocked West Bengal's rural polls on Saturday, leaving 15 people dead while ballot boxes were vandalised, ballot papers torched, and bombs thrown at rivals in several places.
rivals Congress, JMM and TMC and Samajwadi Party.
Banerjee, who was speaking to reporters at West Bengal's state secretariat, said that her party's name will remain the All India Trinamool Congress.
Vaidyanathan apologised to the court but added that the present plea was filed as another petition challenging a high court order dated April 11, 2022 is pending before the apex court.
Torrential rains pounded the tiny Himalayan state of Sikkim and the tea growing region of North Bengal, causing landslides that cut off National Highway-10, the main road linking Gangtok with the rest of the country.
Non-BJP chief ministers are retaliating. If the Centre can use its agencies to threaten, intimidate and jail its rivals, so can they. The fightback will get more intense, observes Shekhar Gupta.
Even as political pressure was building against Ranjith, actor Siddique quit as the general secretary of Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA) amid voices from within his fraternity seeking his resignation.
'A pro-Modi wave and anti-incumbency will be incomplete without strong candidates.'
A day after a Bharatiya Janata Party delegation met President Ram Nath Kovind seeking dismissal of the Mamata Banerjee government over the "political murder" of a party MLA, the West Bengal chief minister wrote a latter to him claiming the saffron party might have presented "distorted facts".
A police team from Purba Medinipur district also visited neighbouring Odisha in search of the absconding factory owner.
The BJP has dropped C T Ravi, a leader from Karnataka, Dilip Saikia, a Lok Sabha MP from Assam, as its general secretaries, and Vinod Sonkar, Harish Dwivedi, both Lok Sabha MPs from Uttar Pradesh, and Sunil Deodhar as secretaries.
A 10-member delegation of Trinamool Congress (TMC) had announced the dharna after meeting a full bench of the Election Commission (EC) to press their demand.
Opposition parties on Sunday lashed out at the Bharatiya Janata Party after Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar and eight others were inducted into the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government, saying the ruling party's 'washing machine' has resumed its operation to clean tainted leaders and it was an 'ED-facilitated power grab'.
In yet another jolt for the Trinamool Congress dispensation, West Bengal forest minister Rajib Banerjee quit the Mamata Banerjee cabinet, joining the growing list of dissenters who have put the ruling camp in a tight spot ahead of the assembly elections.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee appealed to people to maintain peace and calm and urged the protesters to refrain from taking law into own hands.
BJP's Adhikari said that an opposition MLA is usually appointed as the PAC chairperson following the norm, but the TMC misused that rule to appoint Roy as its chairman.
The minister urged the doctors to rejoin work by respecting the Supreme Court's direction to them, but refrained from giving a direct reply on whether the state government would take any punitive action for violating the apex court's order.
Of the 294 candidates declared with serious criminal cases, 76 were from the TMC, 52 from the BJP, 47 from the CPI-M and 31 from the Congress.
The BJP, which has emerged as the main opposition party in West Bengal after winning 77 seats in the assembly polls last year, failed to win even a single civic body.
'The ground reality is that Banglar manush Didir shonge aachhe (The people of Bengal are with Didi).' 'Even as the BJP is still looking for a CM candidate, the elections will be over and we will form government with a two-thirds majority.'
Once a reviled practice in the state, both the parties seem to have endorsed a record number of turncoats this time -- triggering a wave of discontentment among their loyalists.
Singh, who got bail in the alleged excise policy scam from the Supreme Court on Tuesday, also asked the BJP if the prime minister will join the probe if police from the opposition-ruled Bengal, Punjab and Tamil Nadu knocked at his doors.
Trinamool Congress supporters held demonstrations defying lockdown norms in various places, while Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee offered to court arrest on Monday against the arrest of two West Bengal ministers in the Narada case by the CBI.
Congress minister Alamgir Alam said the party's Bermo MLA Kumar Jaimangal has lodged a police complaint against the three legislators for allegedly luring other MLAs by offering Rs 10 crore each and a ministerial berth if the BJP forms government in the state.
As Election 2024 hurtles towards result day in a medley of mangalsutra, mujra, mutton, machli and other barbs, these may sound like character names from Hindi comics of yore. Instead, these are the mocking, sometimes vicious monikers given by political rivals to each other.
All the winners in the assembly bypolls were from the respective ruling parties.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday reviewed the post-cyclone situation and damages caused by Cyclone Yaas in the state at a meeting in Bhubaneswar where Odisha government demanded long term solutions to mitigate problems of repeated cyclones and provision of disaster resilient power systems.
The Congress on Thursday secured a seat in the present Bengal assembly as its candidate Bayron Biswas won the Sagardighi bypoll, defeating the nearest rival of the Trinamool Congress by 22,980 votes.
However, a few defectors, who joined the BJP, got the better of their TMC rivals, including Suvendu Adhikari who emerged as a proverbial giant slayer, by defeating Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee albeit by a narrow margin.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday said she had suggested to the Congress that an advisory council comprising prominent personalities from civil society be set up to give a direction to the opposition, but rued that the plan did not materialise.
As the West Bengal chief minister was busy containing the fallout of an internecine feud in her TMC following a rebellion by a redoubtable Suvendu Adhikari, the Centre shot off a fresh letter to her government to immediately relieve three IPS officers for central deputation.
A fresh political row has erupted in West Bengal over Bharatiya Janata Party national vice-president Dilip Ghosh's alleged unsavoury remarks about West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, with the Trinamool Congress seeking his arrest and unconditional apology.
The state will be referred to as Bangla in Hindi and Bengal in English.
The MGP, which had won three seats in the 2017 polls, is currently left with only one MLA after two of its legislators joined the ruling BJP.
Chatterjee, who was the state education minister when the scam took place, was arrested after around 26 hours of grilling in connection with the probe.
The SBSP can impact around 10 Lok Sabha seats and 40 assembly seats in 7-8 districts in Uttar Pradesh, according to poll analysts.
Mahua asserted that despite all efforts by the Bharatiya Janata Party to "sound the death knell" for constitutional democracy, India is too great a country to be destroyed by the fascists.
Babun Banerjee expressed displeasure over the party re-nominating Prasun Banerjee from Howrah Lok Sabha seat in West Bengal.
What some of our political leaders were up to on Monday.
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.