'Nitish Kumar's government will be at stake. The JD-U is working with a very thin majority, which is a borrowed majority. With just two seats Nitish Kumar has no moral right to stay on,' says Professor Prabhat Ghosh.
The opposition alliance that will take on the ruling National Democratic Alliance in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections will be called Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) and an 11-member committee will be set up for coordination, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge announced after a meeting of the parties in Bengaluru.
The dinner was followed by a meeting in which nearly two dozen allies facilitated Prime Minister Modi.
Modi, Shah and Nadda have created a strategy to boost the BJP and the government's image.
Rampur Sadar and Khatauli in Uttar Pradesh, Padampur in Odisha, Sardarshahar in Rajasthan, Kurhani in Bihar and Bhanupratappur in Chhattisgarh are the assembly seats where the bypolls are being held.
In UP and Bengal, it is willing to sacrifice its interests to stop the BJP and would work towards ensuring the BJP did not win incremental seats in Odisha and Telangana.
Nitish Kumar has failed to curb communal forces and hoodlums across communities. And that is ominous for Bihar's present and future, warns Mohammad Sajjad.
'We like to believe that it's the politicians who impose such bans. But it's the womenfolk of Bihar who made Nitish Kumar enact the ban,' says Ashis Nandy.
Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad has declared that Nitish Kumar will continue as the Bihar chief minister despite his party emerging as the table topper, while he will launch a nation-wide stir against the "communal" Narendra Modi government.
It was soon after that call that Rahul Gandhi and Tejashwi Yadav spoke to each other.
Promising that the Centre will go "all out" to support Bihar in a "big way", Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Tuesday said the government is likely to announce projects and schemes in a few weeks time to assist the resource-rich state.
With assembly elections in Bihar likely to be held later this year, the Election Commission is dispatching four special teams of 'auditors' to the state on Monday for weeding out duplicate entries from electoral rolls.
Biharis seem to have broken the caste divide to vote for good governance in a deeply caste-ridden society and that is Nitish Kumar's biggest triumph.
Most, save Jaitley and Venkaiah Naidu, were silent on Bihar polls; it was business as usual for the PM.
The reputation of Bihar's schools has taken a knock. Satyavrat Mishra explains how a student-teacher nexus has gamed the system to produce toppers by the dozen.
With some variations, all regional political formations, whether in power presently or out of it, share some common features: Tight family control of the political apparatus, key members in elected or appointed positions, obvious wealth but not quite known sources of income, and family factionalism, sometimes open and bitter, notes Shreekant Sambrani.
It would be interesting to see how fast the finance ministry allocates money to the state.
Gujarat witnessed seizures of Rs 71.88 crore in just a few days after the announcement of the election
Yadav claimed that his boss Nitish Kumar, with whom he took oath the day before, has issued instructions to the officials concerned to accord "top priority" to job creation.
Kushwaha was referring to 'Luv Kush' rally in Patna, a veritable gathering of Kurmis and Koeris upset with supposed hegemony of numerically powerful Yadavs which Prasad, then helming Bihar, was seen as embodying.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy Tejashwi Yadav on Friday addressed a joint political rally, the first since the two erstwhile rivals buried the hatchet and aligned nearly four months ago.
At the meeting, many parties urged the Congress to publicly denounce the ordinance but the Congress refused to do so, claimed AAP, adding that the grand old party's "silence raises suspicions about its real intentions".
At least eight MLAs of the opposition Congress in BJP-ruled Gujarat appeared to have voted for Kovind.
Sticking to his offer of 11 Lok Sabha seats to the Congress and one to Nationalist Congress Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo Lalu Prasad on Sunday appealed to Sonia Gandhi to agree to the seat-sharing formula asserting that he would deliver results in Bihar and Jharkhand in the general elections.
The Nationalist Congress Party on Saturday pledged unconditional support to the Janata Dal-United-Rashtriya Janata Dal-Congress alliance for the August 21 bypoll to 10 assembly seats in Bihar to keep the Bharatiya Janaat Party away from power.
Most television channels, including NDTV, were giving NDA a thumbs up, when it was the Grand Alliance that was winning the battle on the ground.
As Bihar awaits the results in the much-awaited polls, Rediff.com takes a look at some of those leaders who won and lost.
The elections in two eastern Indian states were keenly observed in Bangladesh for two major contentious issues, writes Prakash Bhandari from Dhaka.
Addressing his rally at Valmiki Nagar, the former Congress president said he was pained to see that Prime Minister Modi's effigy was burnt in Punjab on the occasion of Dusshera, and added that it reflected the 'anger' of youths and farmers.
'It is precisely because of the apprehensions about Lalu's revival that the upper castes have started re-thinking their electoral preferences. Out of confusion, they are simply deciding to vote for winnable candidates from their respective castes of any of the three parties -- the BJP, JD-U or RJD. This is what has considerably neutralised the NaMo wave in Bihar and resulted in Nitin Gadkari's remark that "Caste is in the DNA of Biharis". This is why Giriraj Singh, the BJP candidate from Nawada, made provocative statements,' says Mohammad Sajjad.
Notwithstanding reports from within the party that severing of ties with the Congress and joining hands with the Rashtriya Janata Dal resulted in Lok Janshakti Party drawing a blank in the Lok Sabha polls, party president Ramvilas Paswan on Monday said he would align again with Lalu Prasad to contest the 2010 assembly elections in Bihar.
It may well be possible to defeat Modi. But nobody seems to know how, points out Vir Sanghvi.
Deadlock on Monday continued on the issue of Congress alliance in Bihar for Lok Sabha polls with seat sharing with Rashtriya Janata Dal coming under strain and Janata Dal-United ruling out any adjustment with the party.
Eminent jurist Ram Jethmalani on Sunday asserted that Indian Parliament "is not sovereign" for its decisions can be challenged in court, as he hit out at Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for criticising the Supreme Court verdict to scrap NJAC Act on appointment of higher judiciary.
The bypolls are termed as a 'rehearsal' for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls by CM Yogi Adityanath.
Criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign policy, Congress leader Manish Tewari has said his 14 months of diplomacy, including meetings with US President Barack Obama, has yielded "zero" results for India.
'Mr Modi's next challenger/s will need to invent a new politics,' says Shekhar Gupta.
Insiders say the BJP is now concerned the LJP putting up a good fight against the JD-U would mean benefitting the MGB in those seats. Moreover, Chirag and Tejaswi are known to be friends, and the former is battling for his political survival.
On Monday, Shashi Tharoor met Sonia Gandhi and expressed his intention to contest the upcoming AICC chief polls.
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