Results coming out of Lok Sabha polls show that parties like Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party and Tamil Nadu's Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam managed to corner a large number of votes but failed to convert them into seats, while parties with lesser vote share have got seats to show in their kitty.
Narendra Modi's ministry expansion makes disdain clear for others who are supposedly allies, quite unlike the Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance.
The BJP cobbles up the numbers to stake a claim to form a government in Imphal. But ruling the restive state won't be easy, says Chitra Ahanthem.
Dharmendra Kumar Singh says the Bihar chief minister may be fighting a losing battle.
Sticking to his offer of 11 Lok Sabha seats to the Congress and one to Nationalist Congress Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo Lalu Prasad on Sunday appealed to Sonia Gandhi to agree to the seat-sharing formula asserting that he would deliver results in Bihar and Jharkhand in the general elections.
Rajnath Singh led the delegation of 26 MPs from 20 parties which stayed overnight in Srinagar before stopping over in Jammu this afternoon.
Biju Janata Dal members had staged a walk-out while NDA ally Shiv Sena did not participate in the voting.
While Bharatiya Janata Party's countrywide vote share shot up by over 12 per cent at the expense of other parties, the chart throws some contrary pictures as parties like Bahujan Samaj Party got no seat in spite of third-highest vote share, but Trinamool Congress and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam clinched over 30 seats each with less than 4 per cent vote share.
The Bharatiya Janata Party was forced to eat the humble pie for a second time in a week. The BJP on Saturday cancelled the membership of controversial former Janata Dal-United MP Sabir Ali.
This is the fifth time that Nitish will be the chief minister of Bihar and this will be his third consecutive term.
PM said Kovind will make an 'exceptional President'.
'The BJP suddenly seems vulnerable. This is not entirely surprising. In the past too, governments and leaders who won a thumping Lok Sabha majority lost popularity in a matter of months... The by-polls results shows that a degree of disenchantment with the Modi government is setting in,' says Praful Bidwai.
Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com explains the compulsions that forced Bihar strongman Lalu Yadav to play second fiddle to Nitish Kumar.
The 'secularists'are more adept at the politics of intense and alarmingly exaggerated fear-mongering, as this kind of politics provides easy votes of Muslims without making them answerable for the concrete issues of poverty, unemployment, lawlessness, and of basic needs like roads, electricity, etc, which is exactly how Nitish Kumar was defeated in the elections, says Mohammad Sajjad.
