"The meeting was very fruitful and we all are very happy with the outcome. I could not attend the press conference after the conclave as I had to come back to Patna. My effort is to unite all opposition parties ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, and now things are taking shape," the Janata Dal-United leader said.
The opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) is a challenge, Union Minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Dharmendra Pradhan said on Friday, adding he has requested his party to allow him to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from his home state Odisha.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday levelled fresh allegations of corruption against the Aam Aadmi Party, saying a former Delhi Jal Board chief engineer had 'transferred' Rs 2 crore of bribe money to his colleagues in the department and the ruling party in Delhi as election funds.
The BJP is focusing determinedly on the seats it lost in 2019, with the hope of winning these either independently or with the aid of its allies.
While the outcome will be known once the meeting is over, more than one of the prospective attendees denied the party's ties with the BJP having worsened to an extent to call for a realignment.
A day after walking out of the National Democratic Alliance, Janata Dal-United President Sharad Yadav on Monday said his party could consider coming back to the alliance if veteran Bharatiya Janata Party leader L K Advani gets back at the helm of the party.
Sibal said the BJP always tries to gain a foothold in states where its presence is limited and afterwards "dumps" its allies.
Some of the Congress's new-found enthusiasm for hitting the streets will show its result in the Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, and Karnataka elections. That is when we will know if the Congress will go to the regional parties or the parties will come to the Congress.
The outcome of the polls to the Rajya Sabha is likely to have an impact in the politically crucial state just ahead of the general elections in the country.
Thackeray announced "complete support" to Rao's "fight" against the Bharatiya Janata Party's alleged anti-people policies and to uphold federal spirit, it said.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah himself sounded more open to such a possibility in a recent interview.
"The prime minister should either bring down prices or leave his chair," Yadav told reporters.
'Unlike in the sporting arena, where sports federations moved from partisan to impartial referees, in Indian democracy's biggest festival, it appears we are moving backward from unbiased and objective to one-sided and partisan,' observes Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led alliance said it would not disrupt Parliament proceedings on the issue.
Maintaining that the INDIA alliance is for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and not for assembly polls in any state, the Congress on Friday asserted that the opposition bloc of 27 parties exists and will fight together.
Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal-United on Sunday exuded confidence that its national president, who was sworn in as Bihar CM for a record ninth time after forming a new government with the Bharatiya Janata Party, will win Monday's trust vote.
The stakes are significant for the BJP in this round as the party had in 2019 won an overwhelming majority of these seats, including all in Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, that will go to polls on May 7.
The Bharatiya Janata Party suffered stunning losses in three Hindi heartland states, partial poll results showed Tuesday, forcing the party to rely on allies to form the government after a bitter and divisive election that was projected as a referendum on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's popularity.
Seeking a third straight term, Modi is not just looking to stamp his electoral dominance on India but also chasing history with another consecutive victory equalling first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's record.
When asked to spell out the exact number of MLAs backing Ajit Pawar, Patel claimed the entire party (53 MLAs) is together.
Addressing over 10,000 block level and district level presidents Congress president Sonia Gandhi blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party for the" grave damage done to our secular polity, our society aand our economy by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government."
The BJP-led NDA's nominee Droupadi Murmu on Friday filed her nomination papers for the July 18 presidential election, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi handing over the set of papers to Returning Officer P C Mody.
The BJP had already won 10 seats unopposed in the 60-member assembly, elections for which were held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls in the first phase on April 19.
It will be in Modi's interest to reinvent his party, read the writing on the wall that voters wrote, and move ahead. He has little choice now. The country is watching, asserts Ramesh Menon.
For now, Modi's government appears singularly focussed on demonstrating that it is not in any way inhibited by the BJP's loss of a majority, and will continue along its patented path of bulldozing all opposition and doing just as it likes, asserts Prem Panicker.
Leaders of several Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) parties met on Saturday to take stock of the opposition's preparations leading up to the June 4 counting of votes polled in the Lok Sabha elections, and claimed they will get more than 295 seats, enough for them to form the next government.
Shiv Sena MP Shrikant Shinde on Tuesday tore into the Uddhav Thackeray faction for 'abandoning' Hindutva and Bal Thackeray's ideology and even recited the Hanuman Chalisa in Lok Sabha as his party opposed the no-confidence motion against the Modi government.
'Not even a single rupee from the electoral bonds should be allowed to be used in the election.' 'If it is used in the election, it will taint India's electoral process itself.'
Union minister Ananth Kumar alleged that the Congress was increasingly becoming intolerant of people's mandate for the Modi government.
Amid suggestions by some Bharatiya Janata Party leaders that Narendra Modi was fit to be the prime minister, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday said the National Democratic Alliance has not yet decided on its prime ministerial candidate and this will be done at a later stage.
Talking to reporters for the first time after the NDA's victory, Kumar, who is set for yet another term in office, said the date for his swearing-in ceremony will be discussed at an 'informal' meeting of all the four NDA constituents on Friday.
A veritable political `storm in a tea cup' has arisen over Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee's assertions on Wednesday that all in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were "not bad" and there are many who "do not support the BJP".
The opposition alliance believes "compulsive abstention" has no place in presidential elections.
The series of meetings are being seen as an attempt by the Bharatiya Janata Party to reach out to allies who have either been criticising or expressing their dissent with the party and also to strengthen the National Democratic Alliance ahead of the Lok Sabha polls next year.
'The Congress should have played a more active role to take care of the needs of regional parties. It failed.' 'Taking this into account, Nitishji took the final decision with the full support of the JD-U.'
Asked whether the SAD would pull out of the National Democratic Alliance as well, Harsimrat said it was for the party to decide and a collective decision would be taken on the issue by all senior leaders together.
The Lok Sabha speaker will meet the Leader of Opposition over breakfast on Tuesday to discuss ways to break the deadlock over the opposition boycott of parliamentary committees.
Bharatiya Janata Party leader Maneka Gandhi on Saturday indicated that her son Varun Gandhi's writings that were sometimes critical of the government may have cost him the party's Lok Sabha ticket from Pilibhit but asserted that he would do very well even without it.
Calling the United Progressive Alliance a "minority government" and ruling out the possibility of a Third Front government, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday claimed that the National Democratic Alliance would come to power after the 2014 elections.
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