The BJP and the Shiv Sena rule the state in coalition, apart from officially being partners in Delhi as well, while also never missing an opportunity to portray each other as a bungler deserving to be dumped.
'Over the years he has been getting a feeling of being sidelined by his uncle.'
Further hardening his stand on seat-sharing with Bharatiya Janata Party, Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray on Monday said he has rejected the saffron ally's demand for contesting 135 seats in Maharashtra assembly polls and hinted at going it alone, saying "everything has an alternative".
Former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh, former defence minister AK Antony, senior leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma also took part in the protest sporting black bands.
In the normal course, a high turnout reflects anti-incumbency but there is no correlation between high turnout and advantage to the National Democratic Alliance, says Dharmendra Kumar Singh.
Chhagan Bhujbal, son of a vegetable vendor, rose through the political ranks by hard work, determination and political opportunism. Now past ghosts have come to haunt him.
This theory of 'Hindus vs the rest' sees the two communities as two separate blocs. Isn't that the two-nation theory? What of the deep bonds that the communities have on the ground? asks Jyoti Punwani.
5 states that contribute just under a fifth of the Lok Sabha's seats will go to the polls early this year.
BJP claimed close to 116 lawmakers from rival parties appeared to have voted for Kovind.
'My feeling is that these parties will not learn their lesson despite their electoral drubbing. They cannot put forward a leader. They have no record of improving their constituents' lives by providing basic services. All they offer is their "'secularism",' says T V R Shenoy.
'No one talks about the Mumbai riots anymore, though like Delhi 1984, the guilty have not been punished. In Gujarat, many powerful leaders of the state's ruling party are in jail for their role in the riots... In Mumbai, only one politician of the Shiv Sena, a former MP, was convicted of hate speech, along with two other Shiv Sainiks, one of whom was a corporator and the other a junior functionary... So why the apathy? Could it be because despite these statistics and the widely-publicised findings of the Srikrishna Commission, what remained in public consciousness was the violence by the Muslims, thanks to a highly efficient Sena propaganda machine? There's no demand for it, but would an SIT probe into the closed cases of the Mumbai riots help today?' The fadeout of Mumbai's riots from public debate can be called a triumph of the communal State, argues Jyoti Punwani.
There is quiet a bit of history behind NCP chief Sharad Pawar's recent outburst about the Maharashtra chief minister, says Neeta Kolhatkar
'Since Pranab Mukherjee is the Custodian of the Constitution, he should present practical ideas to solve the problems he has been so outspokenly highlighting,' feels Sudheendra Kulkarni.
