The Aam Aadmi Party's MP and lone Lok Sabha member Sushil Kumar Rinku joined the Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday along with party MLA Sheetal Angural, dealing a blow to the party already facing a crisis following the arrest of its leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.
Shops, schools and other commercial establishments were closed in parts of Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab but the shutdown call by anti-reservation bodies had little impact elsewhere in the country.
The BJP's defeat in Bihar dents its hopes of improving its RS tally but the grand alliance victory could also present the first signs of tension when five JD-U members retire next year.
The NDA leadership is set to meet on Wednesday to discuss a Parliament floor strategy for what is expected to be a difficult winter session for the government.
The Congress, by and large, focused on local issues in this election and its campaign also was run by state leaders initially.
'The Congress has indeed become overly dependent on the RJD.' 'A few Congress leaders have successfully convinced the national leadership about the benefits of maintaining ties with the RJD.'
Congress senior leaders concede that UPA could be safe in terms of numbers but that does not solve problem totally
'It marks the start of an era where the BJP must now campaign on its own record rather than against the misrule of another party.'
Despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's praise for Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Congress kept cards close to its chest on whether its members of Legislative Assembly would vote in favour of the trust vote sought by him on Wednesday.
The Janata Dal-United, which is opposed to Narendra Modi's projection as BJP's prime ministerial candidate, on Monday said it will discuss all aspects of his anointment as the campaign committee chief and will spell out its stand soon.
Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday said that the defeat of Janata Dal-United in Maharajganj bypoll has no bearing on the National Democratic Alliance.
Plagued by desertions, internal rifts, and with the image of being a "family party", it remains to be seen how Gowda's son and former Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy would steer the party in the May 10 assembly polls.
Modi, 68, was administered the oath of office and secrecy by President Ram Nath Kovind at a glittering ceremony at the forecourt of majestic Rashtraparti Bhavan.
The former Bihar CM can meet guests between 8 am and 12 noon during weekdays in line with the jail manual, Birsa Munda Jail Superintendent Ashok Kumar Choudhary said.
The two who buried their hatchet to come together for the Bihar polls targeted BJP.
Barring 2004 and 2009 when Navjot Singh Sidhu won the Amritsar seat as a BJP MP and 1998 when Daya Singh Sodhi from BJP was elected as the MP, it has essentially a Congress bastion.
Congress general secretary (communications) Jairam Ramesh said they will pose three questions a day to Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the issue.
Assembly elections in Bihar, where the Bharatiya Janata Party is set for a battle against a united Janata Parivar, are likely to be held sometime in September-October when extensive central forces and a reworked expenditure monitoring system will be deployed to curb money and muscle power.
The counting will begin at 8 am, and as per the Election Commission's COVID-19 guidelines, a candidate, his poll agent and counting agent can remain present in the counting hall, officials said, adding various measures have been taken to ensure social distancing and avoid crowding.
Here's a recap of events that occurred in India in the past 24 hours.
Former Karnataka Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar -- contesting on a Congress ticket hoping to reclaim his lost self-respect-- still has photos of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah hanging on a wall in his home-office and says it is not good to remove them.
Asking the people of Bihar to bring their own government to power, the post made a veiled reference to the alleged high handedness of bureaucracy under the JD(U)-BJP rule but fell shy of a frontal attack on Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, his arch rival, or the near hegemonic saffron party which considers him a bete noire.
The remarks by the BJP leaders came as 17 opposition parties resolved to fight the 2024 Lok Sabha elections unitedly to defeat the saffron party and work with flexibility by setting aside their differences. They dubbed the planned alliance as "unholy and opportunistic".
Leave alone taking forward the seat-sharing talks with the existing and probable allies, the Mahagathbandhan remains an amorphous entity weeks before the first phase of polling on October 28, a situation that will make the rival NDA camp, which in any case looks sitting pretty, all the more happier.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Wednesday blamed India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's "two major blunders" -- declaring a ceasefire without winning the entire Kashmir and taking the issue to the United Nations -- for the sufferings of the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
Amit Shah said simultaneous polls would curb expenditure.
The 51-year-old BJP leader Vaishnaw, born in Rajasthan's Jodhpur, is a suave and former Odisha cadre IAS officer from the 1994 batch. He managed to wrangle support from the ruling BJD president and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik despite being in the rival camp.
Ghulam Nabi Azad said this was just a beginning of the alliance process and the nitty-gritty would be decided in the next one or two days.
Rediff.com takes a look at record-setting wins in Indian politics.
In a grand ceremony with overtones of a United States presidential inauguration, heads of state and government, India Inc honchos, opposition leaders, Bharatiya Janata Party members and showbiz stars rubbed shoulders as they watched President Ram Nath Kovind administer the oath of office to India's 58 new ministers.
The contrast between the two meetings couldn't have been more stark, yet, both were organically linked, the latter a show of support for the former.
'In his election speeches, Nitish has been parroting Modi, praising him like never before.'
The political landscape of Bihar is set to change as the Congress, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Ram Vilas Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party are in the final stages of putting together an alliance for the Lok Sabha polls.
What the INDIA alliance needs is neither a counter to Modi's tall personality and undiminished charisma nor a counter-narrative to his Hindutva agenda, now centred on the Ayodhya temple consecration on January 22, argues N Sathiya Moorthy.
The government is banking on help from regional parties and rejigged numbers in the Rajya Sabha.
Siddaramaiah, who hails from the shepherd Kuruba caste, holds the record for presenting the highest number of Budgets in Karnataka -- 13 so far. He has often spoken about how he was mocked in 1994 before he presented his first Budget. 'Some people asked, "Can he count sheep?",' Siddaramaiah told a regional news channel.
Women, if addressed properly, have the potential to become a decisive factor in elections.
In order to pacify the dissidents, the party's central leadership had to replace Bandi Sanjay Kumar with Union Minister G Kishan Reddy as state president of the BJP.
Minority conference organised by the JD-U turned out to be a poor show with few from the Muslim community attending it, exposing the falling credibility of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar as a secular leader, says M I Khan.
Inarguably the biggest gainer in the Grand Alliance, the CPI-ML, often working in the margins of mainstream politics, had 19 candidates in the fray, most of them students and youth leaders.
