Most of the parties concur with Hazare's demands for inclusion of Prime Minister, lower bureaucracy and CBI's anti-corruption wing under Lokpal. However, they did not favour bringing higher judiciary under the ombudsman and argued for a separate mechanism to check corruption in it.
Fissures surfaced among Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) partners ahead of the Jharkhand assembly elections as the Rashtriya Janata Dal on Saturday expressed disappointment over the announcement of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and Congress contesting 70 of 81 seats in the state.
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.
Separate cases have been registered in Kerala against popular Malayalam actors Jayasoorya and Maniyanpilla Raju following an allegation raised by a female actor that they had sexually assaulted her, police said on Thursday. Multiple FIRs have been registered against many high profile Malayalam film personalities following allegations of sexual harassment against various directors and actors in the wake of revelations in the Justice K Hema Committee report. In a Facebook post, the woman actor had said, 'I am writing to report a series of incidents of physical and verbal abuse I suffered at the hands of 1 Mukesh 2 Maniyan Pilla Raju, 3 Idavela Babu, 4 Jayasoorya (Jayasurya), 5 adv Chandrasekaran, 6 production controller Noble and Vichu, in the Malayalam film industry.'
The Delhi high court on Friday sought a response from the Centre, Election Commission of India, and 26 political parties on a petition seeking to restrain opposition parties from using the acronym INDIA for their alliance.
During the Zero Hour of the Lok Sabha, BJP MP Anurag Thakur tried to corner the Leader of Opposition and Congress MP, Rahul Gandhi, by alleging that he has not spoken about ensuring the safety of minorities in Bangladesh.
After days of uncertainty and dragging, the seat-sharing issue between the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and left parties for the April 13 Tamil Nadu assembly polls was finally sealed on Monday with the Jayalalithaa-led party allotting 22 seats to Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Communist Party of India.
18 leaders from 14 parties said it is unfortunate that the government has 'unleashed a misleading campaign to malign the combined opposition' and blaming it for the continued disruption of Parliament proceedings.
'In Parliament, he was the one person who stood for democracy and secularism even when the principal Opposition party was not very forthright in taking on the BJP and RSS.'
Brisk polling was seen for the Wayanad Lok Sabha and the Chelakkara assembly seats in Kerala as they witnessed a turnout of 20.54 and 19.08 per cent, respectively, after the first three hours of voting on Wednesday.
As speculation mounted over whether the Left parties would join the new Congress-led government, the Communist Party of India-Marxist and Communist Party of India on Friday made it clear that the pro-active divestment policies should be scrapped.
After hectic parleys and much back and forth with the INDIA bloc allies, the Congress also ended up going into the polls with its original plan of largely going solo.
The juggernaut of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance, which triumphed in three of the four east and north-eastern states that went for assembly bypolls on Saturday, was halted yet again in West Bengal where Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress registered a six-on-six clean sweep.
Leader of Opposition VD Satheesan on Sunday said the UDF will take part in all the rehabilitation efforts and work towards restoring normalcy in the lives of the survivors.
Although the company has shown willingness to talk to its workers and accept their key demands, it is CITU that is causing a roadblock to a solution.
Political parties in Andhra Pradesh must help the Centre find a solution to the Telangana issue but they are divided and a solution cannot be thrust down their throats, according to Home Minister P Chidambaram. "This is a unique situation where political parties in Andhra Pradesh are divided down the middle. Congress, Telugu Desam, Communist Party of India Marxist, Communist Party of India, they are all divided," he said.
Opposition leaders on Monday slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his comments made at an elections rally in Rajasthan, with some leaders also appealing to people to reach out to the Election Commission of India.
The ruling Mahayuti is poised to retain power in Maharashtra with the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) also putting up a strong show in assembly polls, most exit polls predicted on Wednesday after conclusion of polling on 288 seats in the state. Jharkhand is likely to see a change of government with BJP-led National Democratic Alliance coming to power in the state, three exit polls said on Wednesday with one poll giving majority to the ruling JMM-led alliance.
Nineteen political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress, received over Rs 1,100 crore during assembly polls in five states and Union territories in 2021 and spent over Rs 500 crore, a big chunk of which went towards advertisements and travel expenses for star campaigners, a study said on Friday.
With Communist Party India-Marxist and Trinamool workers clashing in South 24 Parganas district and indulging in violence, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday held a high-level meeting at the state secretariat in Kolkata.
Chief ministers of three Congress-ruled states -- Karnataka's Siddaramaiah, Himachal Pradesh's Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu and Telangana's Revanth Reddy -- have announced they will not attend the NITI Aayog meeting over alleged bias against their states in the Union Budget.
The BJP won 74 seats in the 147-member Odisha assembly and was leading in four more seats, the Election Commission of India.
The RJD polled the highest vote share in Bihar, but it was not reflected in the number of seats it won.
It was a protest which held a mirror to the government of a state taking pride in its commitment to democracy, gender equality and social indices.One person, who in his employed days had known governments and political parties at close quarters, told me that public perception of how the Kerala government handled the ASHA workers' strike had been terrible, reports Shyam G Menon.
A senior TMC leader will be present at the proposed meeting, he said.
In a stunning comeback, Hemant Soren's Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-led alliance on Saturday stormed to power in Jharkhand for a second consecutive term, winning 56 seats in the 81-member assembly, despite an all-out blitz by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance which managed only 24 seats.
Jaishankar briefed the leaders of all parties about the situation in the violence-hit nation and the steps taken by the Indian government.
'When you have a village which is controlled by the BJP, who are the people likely to perpetrate the attack?'
Breaking his silence over the matter, Vijayan on Tuesday sounded tough and said a high-level probe by a top-ranking officer would be held into the charges raised by the MLA.
He drew the roadmap of India's economic reform, unshackled it from the licence raj and pulled it back from the brink when even its gold reserve was pledged.
To pass that time, some candidates preferred to stay with the party workers, others decided to take some rest after the heat and dust of electioneering, while some others took timeout to meet parents before the results were announced.
Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of entering into a pact with the Communist Party India-Marxist to divide votes of the Trinamool-Congress alliance.
An average voter turnout of 20 per cent was recorded in the first four hours of voting in the bypolls to 15 assembly seats spread across Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Kerala and Uttarakhand on Wednesday amid an incident of stone pelting in a village in UP's Meerapur and allegations of police personnel deterring voters from casting their ballot.
At a time when none in Kerala's Left politics questioned the chief minister's authority, MLA P V Anvar hurled a series of accusations against Pinarayi Vijayan's government, notes Shyam G Menon.
The CPI-M leader was fluent in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bangla, and also Malayalam. He was also well-versed in Hindu mythology, and often used those references in his speeches especially to attack the BJP.
Former West Bengal chief minister and a front-ranking Marxist leader Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will go down in the country's history as a pragmatic communist who kept aside his ideological convictions to woo capital for the industrialisation of his state.
If as critics point out, the environmental impact assessment study was commissioned only after the auction process got underway with not all the stakeholders getting to know of it, then the government has already compromised the trust it could have enjoyed with Kerala's public including its coastal communities, points out Shyam G Menon.
Bhuyan Sarma filed the suit at the court of civil judge No 1 of Kamrup metropolitan district on Tuesday and it is likely to come up for hearing on Wednesday, her counsel Padmadhar Nayak said.
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