Prime minister Manmohan Singh and several Congress leaders are against the formation of a separate state but are supporting the decision in the hope that it would win the party seats in the region. Renu Mittal reports
The Bharatiya Janata Party appeared to cede ground in Uttar Pradesh where Samajwadi Party was leading on six of the 11 Assembly seats where bypolls were held while it was neck and neck with Congress in Gujarat and behind in Rajasthan, exactly four months after it swept the three states in Lok Sabha elections.
In early 2017, Amit A Shah warned Nara Chandrababu Naidu that Narendra D Modi was not like Atal Bihari Vajpayee to yield to pressure tactics. Soon, Naidu was to discover this for himself.
As he took oath of office on Sunday night, Nara Chandrababu Naidu has earned a unique distinction of becoming the first chief minister of a new state in addition to being the longest-serving CM of Andhra Pradesh.
The results for the bypolls in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Bihar, Telangana, Maharashtra, Punjab and Tripura were announced on Tuesday.
'Modi's idea of India is to make it less liberal, less tolerant and a less accommodative of diversity.' 'We are headed, if Modi continues, to become an ill liberal democracy.' 'Modi is not Vajpayee. Vajpayee was fundamentally decent, tolerant and fair. He played by the rules of the game. Modi is a different story.'
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