The Rampur assembly seat in Uttar Pradesh which fell vacant following the disqualification of SP leader Mohammad Azam Khan is one of the five seats going for the bypolls.
Congress leader Sachin Pilot on Thursday expressed happiness that the Congress party has taken cognisance of the issues raised by him about welfare of youth and corruption under the previous Vasundhara Raje government in Rajasthan, and asserted the party will contest the assembly polls unitedly to secure a massive victory.
The DMK leadership may now have to deal with a demand for more seats from its Congress ally in the Lok Sabha polls, predicts N Sathiya Moorthy.
To beat BJP, you either deny them a critical mass of Hindu vote or build a regional leader and party strong enough to protect their turf, observes Shekhar Gupta.
'I am not interested in anything but the truth. I only speak the truth, it is my work and I will keep doing it even if I get disqualified or get arrested'
'They are fighting it out, but they have deeply traumatised; they are alive and they are carrying on in life.'
A win for SP could provide some consolation for Akhilesh Yadav after the defeat in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections early this year and the loss of Azamgarh and Rampur Lok Sabha seats to the BJP in June bypolls.
Besides in-charges, the party has also named co-incharges for several states, a BJP statement said.
It said the Congress will infuse new blood in leadership roles without creating new fault lines and cementing its ideological moorings.
The party has already denied tickets to 14 of the 49 legislators who had won last time.
She quit the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2013 claiming the party was under a grip of power politics.
'Maybe the BJP believes, in the post-poll scenario, it will have the might to foist, anybody endorsed by the RSS, upon Bihar,' observes Mohammad Sajjad.
Why weren't the chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Kerala, Maharashtra and Telangana -- all of which have borders with Karnataka -- not invited to Saturday's swearing-in ceremony, asks Shyam G Menon.
Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday urged the Election Commission to derecognise Congress as a national party, accusing it and its vice president Rahul Gandhi of repeatedly violating the model code of conduct.
Addressing a function to mark 'Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas' in Jashpur district, Bhagwat appealed to tribals to stay strong against those who try to dupe them by taking advantage of their innocence.
70 per cent voting was recorded across 18 constituencies of Bastar and Rajnandgaon till 3 pm in the first phase of assembly election in Chhattisgarh, where violence by Naxals who have called for a poll boycott left a Central Reserve Police Force jawan dead.
BJP candidate and minister Kunvarji Bavaliya defeated his nearest rival Congress nominee Avsar Nakiya by a margin of 19,979 votes, officials said.
According to a state government order issued on August 30, prior consent of Telangana is required for the central probe agency on a case-to-case basis to investigate in the state.
'Modiji and the BJP have hoodwinked the nation by their machinations.' 'We have not been able to convince the electorate about Modiji's deceit.'
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has rejigged his team only once, in July 2021, in his second term, unlike in his first stint, when he reshuffled and expanded his council three times.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, however, was conspicuous by her absence at the event, which was attended by tens of thousands of people as the Congress sought to promote opposition unity.
Akash Prakash argues the changes needed to revive growth will happen, whether the BJP or anyone else comes to power in 2014.
The Congress's loss in the three states in the North-East, a region it had dominated for decades, shows there is a lot left to do to reclaim its political turf despite the Bharat Jodo Yatra which it had touted as a successful experiment in mass public outreach.
A day after resigning from the Bharatiya Janata Party, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's niece Karuna Shukla alleged that she had been "mentally tortured" by the party in Chhattisgarh.
In this COVID-19 phase, the BJP leveraged its pre-eminence again to tip the power scales in its favour and relegate its allies in the National Democratic Alliance to a lesser position. Radhika Ramaseshan reports.
Making a strong emotional pitch over the Maoist ambush on Congress leaders in May, Rahul Gandhi on Friday said that former Pradesh Congress Committee chief Nand Kumar Patel was killed to stop him from becoming the chief minister and to silence the voice of the poor and the tribals.
The former Union minister asserted that an objective analysis of the political situation will lead to the conclusion that the Congress has to be the "pole" around which Opposition unity in the 2024 Lok Sabha election can be built.
BJP now governs 35% of country's landmass as against 71% in 2017. 43% of country's population is now governed by the BJP or allies in the states as against over 69 per cent two years ago. In all 3 state polls since its Lok Sabha win, BJP's vote share has fallen by big margins.
The Congress president cited a report quoting Gadkari as saying that party workers should first fulfil their domestic responsibilities as "those who cannot do that cannot manage the country".
A rotating chief ministership as a way to appease factions can work only if there is a credible guarantor, explains Aditi Phadnis.
UP and Bihar contributed 105 seats to the BJP's tally in 2014. It has now lost 8 Lok Sabha by-polls in the last four years, including three successive losses in UP and two seats in Rajasthan.
The incident comes close on the heels of a similar case where 100 cows died in state-run Hingonia cow shelter due to "mismanagement and lack of facilities".
On Tuesday, Mandaviya had written to Congress MP Rahul Gandhi and Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot asking them to strictly follow the COVID-19 guidelines during the party's Bharat Jodo Yatra.
Priyanka Gandhi led the party's charge in Himachal Pradesh with several rallies and was also closely involved in strategy planning for the polls.
The Bharatiya Janata Party postponed its country-wide anti-UPA agitation, which was scheduled to start Monday, in the wake of the killing of several Congress leaders in a Naxal attack in Chhattisgarh.
'You have to work for the development of the people; stay connected with them; be available for your voters so they can come to you for redressal of their problems and don't rely on the brand equity of the central government.'
'COVID-19 is just an excuse to pass anti-labour laws.'
Aiming to breach the Bharatiya Janata Party's Gujarat bastion, the Aam Aadmi Party fielded its candidate to contest all 182 assembly seats and carried out a high decibel campaign in the run-up to the polls in Gujarat.
The Congress party may have its eyes firmly set on the Bharat Jodo Yatra, but it kept its fingers crossed as it waited for Thursday's counting of votes for the assembly elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh.
All 41 candidates from Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Telangana were elected unopposed on Friday after the biennial elections to 57 Rajya Sabha seats were announced recently.
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