Under-recovery or the gap between retail selling price and the cost of import, this month dipped to an all-time low of 8 paise a litre, helped by the monthly increases and softening in international oil rates.
'Why do they talk about Narendra Modi insulting Oommen Chandy when he himself informed the PMO that he would not be available? Why did he write to Delhi that he was preoccupied on the 15th? After that, he should not make such noise about the function.'
Prime Minister Narendra Modi asserted that the BJP has emerged as the "third force" in Kerala that will replace the two fronts in the next year's assembly elections.
Tearing into the Bharatiya Janata Party, Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Saturday said victory for her party in the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls is vital to safeguard the unity and secularism of the country and cautioned the people against giving in to the "untested promises and lies" of the saffron party.
The Congress expressed its 'whole-hearted' support to the 'Bharat bandh' called by farmer unions against the new agri-marketing laws and announced that it will hold protests that day at all district and state headquarters in solidarity with the demands of the farmers. TRS president and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao said the party rank and file would actively participate in the bandh to ensure it was a success.
Buffalo meat was on Wednesday back on the menu of the Kerala House in New Delhi and was lapped up by the lunch-time crowd as the items that were briefly discontinued following a row that saw police carry out a raid at the canteen were sold out within "45 minutes".
'Amit Shah was, briefly, a stockbroker before devoting himself to politics. By instinct or training, he knows the value of keeping blue chips in one's portfolio.'
Unlike the LDF and NDA nominees who are at ground zero and campaigning hard every day, the Congress candidate's campaign is undertaken in absentia, dependent on an army of local and imported from the rest of Kerala Congresswomen and men.
The party says it has trained over 1,00,000 workers in the last one year.
A day after the Union cabinet withdrew a controversial ordinance on convicted lawmakers it had earlier cleared, yoga guru Baba Ramdev on Thursday termed the decision as "strangulation of democracy" as it was effected after condemnation by Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi.
Faced with poll debacle in four states, the Congress is expected to hold a 'chintan shivir'.
Many exit polls predicted that SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh is likely to trump the BJP in the country's politically most crucial state.
"We are trying to transform India's economy where there is a premium on honesty... We switched over from a system which promotes it (corruption, dubious political funding, bribery) into a more ethical system which the developing economies in the world has followed," Jaitley told Times Now.
Congress chief Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday launched a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and charged that the National Democratic Alliance government has 'dictatorial' tendencies even as her party's leaders met in New Delhi to draw up a strategy for painting the ruling alliance as being "anti farmer".
He claimed the NDA government bought the planes at Rs 1,600 crore a piece as against the Rs 526 crore for each aircraft fixed by the UPA.
Even if they score administratively, state governments ruled by the party suffer from an inability to communicate positively, say observers.
BJP ally RPI on Monday spoke out against the de-recognition of an IIT-M students' body allegedly for being critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi
'Congress is on the defensive about scams and corruption charges... The media is against the UPA.... The Nehru family is not just another family; it is a national wealth,'Kerala Chief Minister Oomen Chandy tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier.
'Wait for 2019, there will be no space for the BJP in UP.'
Anything can happen, says a young Congress leader.
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance is projected to form the government at the Centre with exit polls on Monday night giving between 249 and 290 seats to the Narendra Modi-led grouping, which is close to the half-way mark in the 543-member Lok Sabha.
He also said that post demonetisation, black money, which was part of a parallel economy, has now become part of the formal system.
'In the long term, the party that is going to be irrelevant is the Left.' 'It seems absurd that the people of Kerala are the last ones to wake up to the reality that this kind of discredited dogmatic ideological politics has no place in the modern world.'
Modi also accused the Congress and the Communist Party of India-Marxist of covering each other's corruption.
Notwithstanding exit polls giving a clear mandate to the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance the Telangana Rashtra Samithi on Friday said the party still prefers to support a Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre.
The Bharatiya Janata Party's carping ally said the police assertion about security threat to Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Maoists was just a 'conspiracy theory'.
Pawar pressed for forging alliances of anti-BJP parties at state level and favoured picking up the prime ministerial candidate after the election results, as happened after the 1977 and 2004 general polls.
Despite the Samajwadi Party demanding unconditional apology from Bharatiya Janata Party over chants of "Har Har NaMo" cheering BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi during a recent rally in Varanasi, Murli Manohar Joshi on Sunday again raised slogans of 'Har Har Modi' while addressing party workers.
Pointing out that the party had contested seven seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the state LJP chief said there was no reason why it would settle for less than that for the 2019 elections, or for six Lok Sabha seats and one in Rajya Sabha.
Ruptures in the opposition unity emerged barely a week after 17 parties joined hands to put up a joint candidate against the ruling National Democratic Alliance nominee for the July 17 presidential election.
According to HSBC, the 'storm has abated' for the Indian markets as the US Fed has deferred tapering of its quantitative easing stimulus, and as the new Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan has taken steps to contain the rupee fall.
Replying to the debate in Rajya Sabha on a motion thanking the president for his address to the joint sitting of both houses of Parliament, he said for the first time in decades, people of Jammu and Kashmir got benefits of reservation.
The BJP is contesting 437 seats this election, the Congress 423.
The fear of news tailored by private players is a surprise in the internet age. If news websites, run by any entity, can reach out to everyone, why not radio, asks Nivedita Mookerji.
Addressing a press conference in London via Skype, the man, identified as Syed Shuja, said the BJP would have won Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh elections if his team hadn't intercepted the BJP attempts to hack the transmissions in these states.
Kumar had sought central university status for it in keeping with public sentiments.
Michel may prove to be the missing link in the money trail in the alleged multi-crore scam being probed by the CBI.
'The BJP can kill two birds with one stone by wresting back control of the message; and the steps are fairly obvious. Once the media is neutral, there is a level playing field,' argues Rajeev Srinivasan.
'Slightly more than 50 per cent of all Keralites are Hindus. If we can unite as many as we can, we can create a huge difference in the political scene in Kerala.'
Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, 11 parties on Tuesday got together with a vow to defeat Congress-led United Progressive Alliances and prevent the Bharatiya Janata Party from coming to power by presenting themselves as an alternative to them.