Political watchers say the caste survey report was made public to play the OBC-EBC card and stall the BJP's campaign to win most of Bihar's 40 Lok Sabha seats.
Bypolls will be held on Wednesday in 31 assembly seats spread across 10 states and Kerala's Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency, from where Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is making her electoral debut. Though these bye-elections are not going to have any bearing on the governments, they are seen as a big test for the Congress and the INDIA bloc which failed to put up a united show in the recent Haryana assembly polls. Most of these seats fell vacant after the sitting MLAs contested the Lok Sabha elections and won while in some constituencies, the bypolls are being held due to death of the representatives. The Wayanad seat was vacated by Rahul Gandhi, who also won from the Rae Bareli parliamentary constituency which he kept. Voting will be held in seven seats in Rajasthan, six in West Bengal, five in Assam, four seats in Bihar, three in Karnataka, two seats in Madhya Pradesh, and one seat each in Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala and Meghalaya. Votes will be counted on November 23.
The Janata Dal-United state unit in Manipur has withdrawn support to the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Biren Singh government and the party has informed its decision to governor Ajay Kumar Bhalla.
'Undeniably, Modi's position has stabilised and he has staged a comeback of sorts from the weeks after the Lok Sabha results.' 'Coalition partners are likely to be more tolerant of Modi... The forthcoming elections in Delhi and Bihar will determine whether this continues or not.' 'To win Delhi and Bihar, Modi will have to work in conjunction with the RSS.' 'However, because of the 'truce' that has been worked out within the Sangh Parivar, Modi will have to be more consultative than he has been in the past ten years,' reveals Modi biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
The counting of votes for the bypolls to 46 assembly seats in 13 states and in the Lok Sabha segments of Nanded in Maharashtra and Wayanad in Kerala, a crucial electoral exercise since the parliamentary polls in April-May, will begin at 8 am on Saturday.
The meeting in New Delhi etc is just the BJP being nice to the man who helped it realise its dream by stabbing Uddhav in the back, notes Saisuresh Sivaswamy.
Subhashini Yadav, a social worker, said she is taking the responsibility of carrying on the fight of the 'Mahagathbandhan' in Bihar, as her father Sharad Yadav has always supported it.
The crowds were stunned into silence for a few seconds, after which they erupted in applause for the 69-year-old leader who has ruled the state for nearly 15 years.
Kangana Ranaut's decline as an actor feels complete, observes Utkarsh Mishra.
Police personnel removed him and his supporters from the protest site as they were holding the demonstration near a restricted area, and thus it was "illegal", a senior officer said.
Two persons from Uttar Pradesh were shot at by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir's Budgam district on Friday evening, officials said.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav also have cases registered against them.
The Mahagathbandhan's seat-sharing announcement comes a day after the filing of nomination papers for the first phase of Lok Sabha polls was over.
The Supreme Court on Monday sought the Election Commission's response on a PIL challenging its decision to increase the maximum number of voters from 1,200 to 1,500 at every polling station, saying no elector should be excluded.
On the possible motive behind the murder, Prabhat said the temple was embroiled in a land dispute.
Justice Khanna said all the intervention applications filed on the issue will also be taken on April 16 when the final hearing will take place.
With four seats each won by junior allies Hindustani Awam Morcha-Secular and Vikassheel Insaan Party, the NDA bagged 125 seats in its kitty, three more than the number required for a simple majority.
The meeting was attended by Congress in-charge for Rajasthan Sukhjinder Randhawa, CM Gehlot, RPCC president Govind Singh Dotasra and other leaders.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was stranded in Jharkhand's Deoghar airport for nearly two hours on Friday after his special Indian Air Force aircraft developed a snag, flew back to Delhi in another plane, officials said.
'There was a 77 per cent chance that electorates in India voted for the same party for both the state and Centre when elections were held simultaneously.'
BJP-led NDA gave five seats to the Chirag Paswan-led LJP (Ram Vilas).
Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, BJP chief J P Nadda and new party entrant Ashok Chavan and Union ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw and L Murugan were among the 41 candidates elected unopposed to Rajya Sabha on Tuesday while Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh will witness polling on February 27.
Former Maharashtra minister Baba Siddique, who was shot dead in Mumbai, was a popular figure in Bollywood circles and had earned praise for supplying life-saving medicines to patients during the Covid pandemic.
BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis was sworn in as the new Chief Minister of Maharashtra in a grand ceremony at Azad Maidan in Mumbai.
Acting Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, in his first visit to the national capital after leading his ruling alliance to an unprecedented second straight term in the state.
Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader Hemant Soren on Sunday met Jharkhand Governor Santosh Kumar Gangwar and staked claim to form the government, soon after leaders of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) in the state unanimously elected him as the legislature party leader.
Referring to last year's dramatic turn of events in Maharashtra, which saw the Shiv Sena severing ties with the BJP and forming government with ideological rivals Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress, Sena MP Sanjay Raut said his party had shown what happens 'when word is not kept' by an alliance partner.
The party was floated exactly two years after Kishor had embarked on a more than 3,000-km-long 'padayatra' of the state.
Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader and party's candidate from Kalkaji, Ramesh Bidhuri, has yet again courted controversy by allegedly saying that after victory in the Delhi assembly polls next month, he will develop smooth roads in the constituency like Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi's 'cheeks'.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Bihar government to put in the public domain the break-up of the caste survey data to enable those aggrieved to challenge the findings.
'The RJD is a family centric party and its top leadership's main concern is only to promote the family.'
The party leaders and ministers also credited the victory in Bihar to the Modi government's success in navigating the country during the COVID-19 crisis.
States are on track of fiscal consolidation with their total borrowings reaching Rs 5 trillion till October, which is 60 per cent of the projected borrowings of Rs 8.38 trillion till December 2024, according to data from official sources. Government officials said the lower-than-projected borrowings by states were a sign of prudent fiscal management by them. States announce their borrowing plans every quarter.
Releasing the manifesto titled 'Badlav Ka Sankalp' (commitment to change) in the presence of All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary Randeep Singh Surjewala and other Mahagathbandhan leaders, Tejashwi Yadav said their government, if elected, would first approve the process for appointments on about 10 lakh jobs in the government.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday warned that Bihar's areas close to the borders (seemant) will become 'infested with infiltrators' if Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not voted back to power.
As the race for Maharashtra chief minister enters the last lap, Hemant Waje looks at several scenarios which can play out.
Reacting to allegations that his party was dividing anti-BJP votes, Owaisi said he was running a political party that has a right to contest on its own.
Union ministers Ravneet Singh Bittu and George Kurian were elected unopposed to Rajya Sabha Tuesday along with senior Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi and former minister Upendra Kushwaha.
This will be the first full-year Budget of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government since it came to power for a third consecutive term in July last year.
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