Veteran Congress leader Digvijaya Singh and Bharatiya Janata Party candidates Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sumer Singh Solanki on Friday won Rajya Sabha election from Madhya Pradesh.
Apart from the 18 members of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), including the Bharatiya Janata Party, seven non-National Democratic Alliance parties will attend the ceremony, going by their stated position on the issue which has snowballed into another political flashpoint between the ruling and opposition camps.
'What the Congress needs now is an ideological and social contrast to the BJP.' 'The Congress stable of princelings cannot do it,' argues Mohan Guruswamy.
The Congress chief reiterated that Rs 30,000 crore was "wrongfully" given to Anil Ambani in the purchase of Rafale fighter planes.
Elections will be held on June 10 to fill 57 Rajya Sabha seats from 15 states falling vacant due to the retirement of members on different dates between June and August, the Election Commission said on Thursday.
Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren's jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over their telephonic talks on COVID situation triggered political slugfest with the Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday accusing Soren of lacking the basic courtesy expected of a person holding his office and lowering its dignity.
Kharge or somebody else, whoever becomes the chief, he will only be a face to show, Sushil Modi said.
'If the leadership goes back to Rahul Gandhi, then there will be a perception problem about the drama about his exit a year-and-a-half ago.'
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who set off a national debate when he walked the Bharat Jodo Yatra in a T-shirt in north India's cold winter, donned a pheran to ward off Kashmir's bone-freezing chill on Monday.
P Chidambaram and Rajeev Shukla of the Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party's Sumitra Valmiki and Kavita Patidar, former Congress leader Kapil Sibal, Rashtriya Janata Dal's Misa Bharti and Jayant Chaudhary of the Rashtriya Lok Dal were among the 41 winners declared elected unopposed to Rajya Sabha.
The court noted that no appreciable steps have been taken ever since an order was passed by it on June 13 to deploy central forces in sensitive areas for the poll process.
The opposition leaders also accused the government of violating Constitutional norms by not inviting President Droupadi Murmu to the event.
Both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were adjourned till 2 pm after opposition members held protest in Parliament seeking a discussion on the issue.
While it took the Congress nearly a half century to earn the hatred of other political outfits, the BJP appears set to reach there in around six years, says Arun Bhatnagar, former secretary to the GoI.
The Congress is planning to call a meeting of Opposition parties in May. It is possible to keep all possibilities open in case Karnataka yields a hung House, leading to a recalibrated Opposition.
Kerala Chief Minister and CPI-M leader Pinarayi Vijayan, Andhra Pradesh CM N Chandrababu Naidu, West Bengal CM and Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee, and Karnataka CM Kumaraswamy lent support to the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party government's fight with the Centre.
With the ignominy of a duck in Delhi, the free-fall in Congress' fortunes under Rahul Gandhi continued unabated with possibly grim forebodings for the grand old party.
While the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress alleged that the killings were a fallout of the TMC's infighting, the ruling party pointed fingers at the grand old party of India.
Shashi Tharoor also said that it was too premature to write the obituary for the Congress party and that as an organisation it had no time to sit and lick its wounds as it must immediately pick itself up for the upcoming state elections.
Pawar said even during the Emergency years there was a feeling in political circles that nothing would change for the next 25 years, but people ushered in change the very next year in 1977.
During the Rath Yatra, Lord Jagannath, his elder brother Balabhadra and younger sister Subhadra are carried from their home temple to another temple, located in what is believed to be their aunt's home.
Leader of the House Arun Jaitley maintained that the governments in Goa and Manipur are being formed as per the democratic norms.
Hectic preparations were underway at the Congress headquarters for the ceremony where party president Sonia Gandhi will hand over the baton to her successor, Mallikarjun Kharge, the first non-Gandhi to head the outfit in 24 years.
Consolidating its position, the Bharatiya Janata Party wrested high-profile Rampur and Azamgarh Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh from the Samajwadi Party and won three assembly seats, including that of Chief Minister Manik Saha, in Tripura in by-election results announced on Sunday.
The total income of national and regional parties from unknown sources for 2020-21 stands at Rs 690.67 crore.
"The electorate of Bihar yearn for a change and for this they want the Congress, LJP and JD (U) to unitedly fight the assembly elections," he said.
Counting of votes for the bypolls in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand will be taken up on Sunday.
'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.'
"For me, they (Maoists) are no enemies at all. If they are under some wrong notions, we need to talk to them," Rao said in the Rajya Sabha, while participating in a debate on the Dantewada massacre.
The Bharatiya Janata Party's parliamentary board on Tuesday named Droupadi Murmu, the party's tribal leader from Odisha, as the ruling National Democratic Alliance's candidate for the presidential election.
Former finance minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and a senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha has denied that he is joining the Congress party. Sinha spoke to rediff.com from Hazaribagh in Jharkhand, where he was holding series of meetings in his constitutency, after resigning from all party posts on Saturday.
Mishra was catapulted to the chief ministership of Bihar following the assassination of his elder brother Lalit Narayan Mishra in 1975.
Eight BJP-ruled states have fully vaccinated 50 per cent of their eligible population with the coronavirus vaccine and seven of them have inoculated 90 per cent people with the first dose, numbers not yet achieved by any state ruled by the Congress and its allies, official sources said Monday.
Thackeray on Tuesday announced his party's support for Murmu in the July 18 presidential election.
Leaders of several opposition parties were stopped by the police at Vijay Chowk in New Delhi as they took out a protest march from Parliament House to hand over a complaint to the Enforcement Directorate on the Adani issue.
Gandhi came along with Mukherjee and while the former president left after sometime, the Congress chief offered to drop him back but Mukherjee politely refused.
Polling was by and large peaceful in the bypolls for three Lok Sabha and seven assembly seats spread across five states and Delhi on Thursday barring an incident of stabbing of a policeman in Tripura, where polling was the highest at 76.62 per cent.
Alva, 80, would file her nomination papers on Tuesday, July 19 which is the last date for filing nominations for the August 6 election.
The youth leadership taking the reigns of the states was a rare event in the last century as very few broke the glass ceilings.
BJP national spokesperson Shehzad Poonawala said the Congress has insulted Murmu.
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