Inarguably the biggest gainer in the Grand Alliance, the CPI-ML, often working in the margins of mainstream politics, had 19 candidates in the fray, most of them students and youth leaders.
The unrest in the Sandeshkhali region of West Bengal ballooned into a major political row on Thursday as Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee blamed the saffron camp of fomenting trouble in the area, while the Bharatiya Janata Party and the National Commission for Women (NCW) accused her party Trinamool Congress and the state government of being complicit in crimes against women in the area.
Kerala Minister Saji Cheriyan on Tuesday landed in trouble for his harsh remarks against the Constitution, triggering a huge political row in the state with the opposition demanding for his sacking, but the Left leader later expressed regret and claimed news reports in this connection were 'distorted'.
A senior Delhi Police officer, however, said no student was detained.
Taking potshots at the Bharatiya Janata Party, some opposition leaders also wondered if Goel resigned to contest the Lok Sabha polls on its ticket like former Calcutta high court judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay.
The Congress and the Left parties have not only extended support to the Samajwadi Party candidate but are also campaigning for him, in accordance with the spirit of the new opposition togetherness ahead of next year's general election.
The cortege will first travel to Park Street and then along AJC Bose road to the CPI-M's headquarters on Alimuddin Street. Basu's body will lie in state at the party headquarters for an hour to let party members to pay homage. The carriage will later proceed to the West Bengal Assembly, where Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will pay tribute.
Congress deputy leader in Lok Sabha Gaurav Gogoi claimed in a social media post that the website of the Ministry of Food Processing shows the CM's wife Riniki Bhuyan Sarma's firm Pride East Entertainments Pvt Ltd has received Rs 10 crore as part of credit credit-linked subsidy.
The Congress expressed its 'whole-hearted' support to the 'Bharat bandh' called by farmer unions against the new agri-marketing laws and announced that it will hold protests that day at all district and state headquarters in solidarity with the demands of the farmers. TRS president and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao said the party rank and file would actively participate in the bandh to ensure it was a success.
Opposition parties will hold the next meeting of their 26-member INDIA coalition in Mumbai on August 25 and 26, sources said on Thursday.
The deceased has been identified as Manas Das, an active local committee member of CPI-M, East Midnapore district Superintendent of Police G Srinivas told reporters in Nandigram.
If everything goes as expected, Arya, now a second year graduation student of a Thiruvananthapuram college, would not only become the new mayor of Kerala's capital, a position held by several significant personalities in the past, but also the youngest ever mayor in the country.
'Today, the BJP is using power in such a manner that they not only crush the Opposition, but even their own supporters can't rebel.'
The party was trounced in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and is now left with only Himachal Pradesh in the north. It is ruling in only three states on its own and is in power in Bihar and Jharkhand as a junior partner in alliance with regional parties.
Another meeting convened by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge at his residence in New Delhi on Wednesday with the floor leaders of the INDIA constituents in Parliament will, however, go ahead according to its schedule to formulate the opposition strategy for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
There they were, showing the world that there are still people motivated not by religious structures, not by past glories, not by hatreds deliberately stoked. These were ordinary folks doing something extraordinary purely because they think that effort might shake a nation out of a spiralling miasma of division, mistrust, cynicism, sophistry and violence.
Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao-led Bharat Rashtra Samiti has pinned hopes on the development work his government undertook during the past ten years, while opposition Congress and BJP bank on anti-incumbency and the alleged failures of the incumbent.
A 23-year old woman, daughter of a senior Communist Party of India-Marxist leader in Thiruvananthapuram, has accused her parents of forcefully having taken away her new-born child from her soon after its birth a year ago and approached the police seeking to get the baby back.
Even as the grand old party seeks to promote opposition unity ahead of the hustings next year, Trinamool Congress supremo and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, however, would be conspicuous by her absence at the event at Sree Kanteerava Stadium.
The go-ahead given to prosecute Arundhati Roy would be seen by supporters of freedom of speech as an announcement that the Right-Wing doesn't feel humbled by the results of the elections, argues Shyam G Menon.
Separately, the hunger strike by climate activist Sonam Wangchuk in Leh to "remind" the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Centre of its promise to safeguard the Union Territory's fragile ecology and unique indigenous tribal culture entered its 15th day.
A five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court is scheduled to commence a crucial hearing from Tuesday on a batch of pleas challenging the validity of the electoral bonds scheme for funding political parties.
A team of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on Friday held on-spot inquiries in Sandeshkhali to ascertain facts about alleged sexual abuse by some Trinamool Congress leaders even as fresh agitation rocked the trouble-torn village, where locals torched the property of accused Trinamool leaders and held demonstrations against the delay in arresting the main accused, Shahjahan Sheikh.
Legislators of the ruling coalition partners in Jharkhand expressed solidarity with the Hemant Soren government on Wednesday and said the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader will continue as the chief minister.
Nine live bombs were seized from the house of a school teacher, a Communist Party of India-Marxist supporter, in the Marxist party's stronghold of Khejuri adjoining Nandigram on Tuesday evening, a senior Central Reserve Police Force official said.
Mamata asserted that she has not spoken to anyone in the Congress on seat-sharing in the state for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.
Some constituents of the alliance have raised concern that the panels, particularly the 14-member coordination committee, are at risk of becoming ineffective, as their decisions have so far not been acted upon.
Briefing reporters after the nearly two-hour meeting, Abdullah said the leaders decided to formalise the alliance, that has been named 'Peoples' Alliance for Gupkar Declaration'.
Leaders of the Communist Party of India-Marxist gathered last week in Kerala, the only state the CPI-M still rules today.
In the last six assembly elections, the state voted the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress to power alternately.
The highlight of the occasion, according to officials, is an address to a special gathering in the morning by President Xi Jinping, who cast himself in the mould of Mao Zedong, the founder of the Communist Party of China as it is officially called.
The meeting of the 14-member all-important panel of the opposition will take place at the residence of Nationalist Congress Party leader Sharad Pawar in New Delhi on September 13 evening.
In financial year 2020-21, the BJP declared assets worth Rs 4,990 crore, up by 21.17 per cent to Rs 6,046.81 crore in 2021-22.
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Sunday lashed out at Governor Arif Mohammed Khan for calling a group of protesting Students' Federation of India (SFI) members 'criminals' and said the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government has 'let loose such a deranged man'.
Seventy-seven MLAs were present in the assembly during the voting.
'You don't win elections on the basis of borrowed players.' 'There is a great crisis of leadership for the BJP in Bengal'
Senior Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee on Friday said he will participate in the party's protest programme in New Delhi on October 3, a day after he was summoned by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for questioning in connection with the school jobs scam in Kolkata on the same day.
Under the stewardship of the then TMC national general secretary Mukul Roy and North 24 Parganas TMC district president Jyotipriyo Mullick, he joined the party and quickly ascended in power, becoming a close associate of Mullick.
Once a reviled practice in the state, both the parties seem to have endorsed a record number of turncoats this time -- triggering a wave of discontentment among their loyalists.
Leading the party in the state since 1998, the re-election of the 67-year-old leader again demonstrated his hold on CPI(M), which often in the past passed through grim phases of factional trend involving him and former Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan.
