The Election Commission has deputed a special observer for the Lok sabha polls in two parliamentary constituencies -- Saran and Maharajganj in Bihar, to ensure free and fair elections that will be held on May 7, officials on Monday said.
Operations at the Delhi airport remained normal. However, three flights were returned or diverted to the Delhi airport due to bad weather in Chandigarh, Varanasi and Lucknow on Tuesday night.
Anupriya Patel, Pankaj Chaudhary and B L Verma are from the Other Backward Classes, which BJP leader in UP say make up 50 per cent of voters in the state. Three others -- Kaushal Kishore, Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma and S P Singh Baghel -- are from the Scheduled Castes category. Ajay Kumar is the lone Brahmin in this batch of ministers from the state.
Uttar Pradesh shares a 599.3 km long open border with Nepal touching seven districts - Pilibhit, Lakhimpur Kheri, Bahraich, Sravasti, Balrampur, Sidhharthnagar and Maharajganj.
Spread over 10 districts, polling in these constituencies will be held from 7 am till 6 pm on Thursday.
Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad's brother-in-law Anirudh Prasad alias Sadhu Yadav on Friday said that he would not confront former Chief Minister and sister Rabri Devi as an independent candidate from Saran seat but would now contest for the Maharajganj Lok Sabha seat.
The sixth round of Uttar Pradesh assembly polls will see voting for 57 seats on Thursday sealing the fate of political heavyweights such as Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the Congress' Ajay Kumar Lallu and Samajwadi Party's Swami Prasad Maurya.
Making a scathing attack at Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for playing down the defeat in Maharajganj by-poll, Rashtriya Janata Dal President Lalu Prasad on Thursday said he should quit as people had rejected his governance.
Around 1.72 crore voters, including 94.60 lakh men and 77.84 lakh women, are eligible to cast their votes in this round to decide the fate of 635 candidates.
The prominent faces among the 676 candidates for 57 seats spread across 10 districts in this phase included Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath from Gorakhpur Urban and state Congress president Ajay Kumar Lallu from Tamkuhi Raj.
Man arrested in NHPC engineers' kidnap case
Terming Friday's Maharajganj incident in which ten people were charred to death, as an indicator of the prevailing jungleraj in the state, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday demanded Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati's resignation.
The Congress vice president has eyes on the larger objective of his partnership with Akhilesh, which may provide the template against the BJP in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
An estimated 57.03 per cent voters cast their ballots on Saturday in the sixth phase of the Uttar Pradesh elections covering 49 Assembly seats, including Mau, where gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari is in the fray.
The seat sharing formula reached between the BSP and SP is not on the basis of who emerged stronger in the previous election.
With the Yogi Adityanath government taking credit for cracking down on criminals and making it an election issue, political parties are now having a rethink on aligning with those who have a criminal background but also enjoy influence in their areas.
The UP minister embarrasses the government ahead of the GST rollout.
The Congress is a dismal third in 17 of the 19 constituencies where the party's general secretary (east) campaigned in Uttar Pradesh.
Counting of votes began on Sunday for lakhs of panchayat seats in Uttar Pradesh, a process expected to take two days across 829 centres. There were scuffles involving the supporters of candidates in three districts and social distancing to fight the spread of coronavirus went for a toss at several places, reports said.
Lalu Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal on Wednesday won Maharajganj Lok Sabha bypoll by a convincing margin of over 1.37 lakh votes.
With the political scene hotting up towards an early Lok Sabha election, both the ruling Samajwadi Party and its sworn rival, the Bahujan Samaj Party were desperately vying for the Brahmin vote.
Curfew was imposed on Tuesday night in 10 police station areas of KashmirValley as a precautionary measure with the authorities apprehending law and order problem following the killing of a youth in firing allegedly by security forces in Baramulla district.
By-elections for four Lok Sabha and five assembly seats in four states went off peacefully on Sunday. Results of these by-polls, which will be announced on June 5, will be keenly watched in the run-up to the 2014 general elections.
The youth brigade, set up in 2002 by Yogi Adityanath who is now Uttar Pradesh chief minister, filed a complaint against Yohannan Adam, the pastor of the church, accusing him of converting Hindus to Christianity, a charge the pastor denied.
India's plant-based meat market is estimated at $30-40 million, largely driven by consumer packaged food. The market size in India is likely to touch $500 million in three years.
In Uttar Pradesh, the death toll due to lightning strikes rose to 42.
A 108-year-old murder convict -- believed to be India's oldest prisoner -- was released from Gorakhpur district jail, about 300 km from Lucknow, on Friday following a special bail granted to him by the Allahabad high court.
"Over 5.42 lakh migrants were screened by health workers and among them 1,230 have been found positive for coronavirus. Samples of 46,142 have been sent for testing," said Principal Secretary (Medical and Health) Amit Mohan Prasad in Lucknow.
Nine persons, including five children, were on Friday charred to death and three others injured when some houses were set ablaze by villagers agitated over the murder of a village head in Thuthibari area of Uttar Pradesh's Maharajganj district, police said.
With four more patients succumbing to encephalitis, the toll in the disease in the eastern districts of Uttar Pradesh has climbed to 275 this year, health officials said on Friday.
A Samajwadi Party Member of Legislative Assembly has been booked for setting a woman on fire in Uttar Pradesh's Maharajganj district. According to the police, MLA Sripati Azad, who represents the Sadar assembly seat, set Savitri Devi, a widow, on fire in Rampur Buzurg village following a heated argument.According to sources, Azad was a frequent visitor to the widow's house.The woman, who received serious burn injuries, has been admitted to the Gorakhpur Medical Hospital.
Rupesh Kumar Singh, 40, was sprayed with bullets while he was inside his SUV waiting for the gates of his residence in Punaichak locality in the city to open after his return from office on Tuesday evening.
As the countdown begins for the Ayodhya title suit verdict, Mohammad Habib of a nondescript village in Jaunpur district is reciting the Ramayan while locals in a village in Maharajganj district have decided to build a temple and mazaar on a small piece of land to send out a message of social harmony.
Cold wave claimed 204 lives in north India as dense fog returned to the region after a gap of two days affecting flights and trains in the national capital even as parts of Kashmir experienced sub-zero temperatures.
On the eve of the sixth and penultimate phase of the marathon Uttar Pradesh elections, Rediff.com's Aslam Hunani reports on what's at stake.
Was the railways responsible for some members of Lok Sabha being absent from the House on Monday that led to collapse of Question Hour and triggered a controversy?
For the residents of Shaheed Bhagat Singh Camp, living next to a crematorium is as much a struggle as keeping COVID-19 at bay.
Evidently, she has a soft corner for Nishad, who will be now facing just a simple magisterial inquiry. Interestingly, Mayawati claimed , "I wanted to hand over this case to the CBI, as I do not want my adversaries to accuse my administration of bias; but considering that CBI had been consistently turning down all our recommendations, I chose to order a magisterial probe into the incident."
The 31-year-old is seeking re-election from Raghopur in Vaishali district which he had wrested back for his party from the Bharatiya Janata Party's Satish Kumar in 2015. The BJP leader had defeated Yadav's mother Rabri Devi, a former chief minister, in 2010.
