Several legislators in states on Monday said they have cross-voted in favour of National Democratic Alliance nominee Droupadi Murmu by not following their respective party lines in the presidential election.
A delegation of 21 Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) bloc MPs will pay a two-day visit to Manipur beginning Saturday to assess the ground situation first-hand and then make recommendations to the government and Parliament for a solution to the problems in the violence-hit state.
The Congress president has written to party chief ministers, asking them to file a review petition against an SC order regarding mass-scale evictions of tribals and other forest-dwellers.
MPs and MLAs taking bribes to vote or make a speech in the house are not immune from prosecution, the Supreme Court said on Monday in a landmark, unanimous verdict that overrules its 1998 judgment protecting such lawmakers.
Counting of votes for the bypolls in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand will be taken up on Sunday.
'...a more capable State -- one that operates with greater capacity, greater efficiency, and greater clarity of purpose.' 'But I also see a more despotic State -- one that places more constraints on speech, assembly, dissent, and critique.' 'It may run 'better', but on the regime's rules.'
The decision of some key regional parties like the Biju Janata Dal, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti and the Aam Aadmi Party to skip a key opposition meet called by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on the presidential poll has cheered the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party as it believes that their absence has only highlighted the faultlines and one-upmanship among its rivals.
Both the BJP and the Congress have banked on new and young faces, some of whom have been nominated by the parties for the first time.
Top leaders of 26 opposition parties were arriving in Bengaluru on Monday for a two-day brainstorming session with a call for unity and are expected to chalk out their joint programme aimed at defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
By conventional yardsticks, Das was an audacious choice by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP president Amit Shah, like Devendra Fadnavis was in Maharashtra and Manohar Lal Khattar in Haryana. Will his choice pay off in the elections next month?
Defectors getting tickets is causing tremendous heartburn in the BJP, says Aditi Phadnis
Murmu's vote share is now likely to go past 61 per cent, while it was earlier estimated to be around 50 per cent at the time of her nomination.
From the point of view of qualification, Murmu is probably educationally the least qualified among India's recent Presidents. But then, with the BJP in command, she will be required to do little but sign on the dotted line.
In order to maintain social distancing, the NTA has increased the number of exam centres from originally-planned 2,546 to 3,843, while the number of candidates per room has been reduced from earlier 24 to 12.
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.
In order to maintain social distancing, the NTA has increased the number of centres from 2,546 to 3,843 for the NEET while the number of candidates per room has been reduced from earlier 24 to 12.
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 Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress on Sunday were set to share the honours in the Lok Sabha and assembly bye-elections in 13 states.
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.
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.
Uddhav claimed that splits were engineered in many parties using central agencies and arrests were made illegally.
At a time when finding out who is paying for labourers' train tickets is a task for Sherlock Holmes, Hemant Soren's Jharkhand government has flown in stranded workers from Ladakh, and is probably the only state that has tried to give 'migrant workers' a modicum of respect, observes Debashish Chatterjee.
A meeting of opposition leaders from many anti-Bharatiya Janata Party parties, most of them regional forces, hosted by the veteran leader and Nationalist Congress Party president Sharad Pawar on Tuesday is being seen by political pundits as a beginning of an exercise by them to join forces to put up a more cohesive challenge to the saffron party.
The Congress chief reiterated that Rs 30,000 crore was "wrongfully" given to Anil Ambani in the purchase of Rafale fighter planes.
While the governments of Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have assured students that they will provide transportation to candidates, a group of IIT alumni and students have also launched a portal to provide transport facilities to exam centres for the candidates in need.
Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com gives the lowdown on the 59 seats spread across seven states and one Union territory going to polls in the last and final phase of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections on May 19, 2019.
Addressing a joint press conference after a meeting of 26 opposition parties in Bengaluru, Kharge said, "This was a very important meeting to save democracy and the Constitution in the interest of the people of the country."
Announcing the name of candidates for the West Bengal assembly polls, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday said she will be contesting from the Nandigram constituency as announced earlier.
At least three members of the BJP Parliamentary Board, that approved candidates list, told me that release of my book by Nitish Kumar in 2017 was strongly resented and probably this cost me the party nomination, Roy said.
Sources said the opposition parties would look to avoid the prickly leadership question as of now and emphasise on building a common ground.
The Congress, who has presently become a "leaderless" party, has also been facing multiple shocks at the state levels.
A basic outline and roadmap for Opposition unity are likely to be deliberated upon with the contentious issue of seat sharing and leadership questions to be avoided for now.
More than 20 national leaders will attend the meeting, TMC sources said. Most of them have already arrived in Kolkata.
With the Congress down in the dumps and the BJP juggernaut on a roll, 'secular' parties are attempting to revive the Janata Parivar coalition to fill the vacuum.
Varma sought 'ideological clarity' from Nitish over extending alliance with the BJP beyond Bihar despite having expressed apprehensions 'in private' about the BJP-RSS leading the nation into a 'dangerous space'.
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.
The senior Congress leader was in a coma since October last year, when he was admitted to AIIMS after he suffered a brain haemorrhage.
These parties also asked the Centre to present a revised comprehensive economic package that will be a 'true stimulus' and sought reversal of all unilateral policy decisions, especially pertaining to labour laws, as they put forth a 11-point demand charter before the government during a virtual meeting, called by the Congress to discuss the situation arising out of the pandemic as well as the lockdown.
'The people of Jharkhand know that Modi is not going to become chief minister, so why should they vote for the BJP?'
There was considerable disquiet in the Congress after Mukherjee accepted the invitation of the RSS to address its workers at its headquarters in Nagpur.
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