A home ministry spokesperson, however, said the decision does not imply that the AFSPA has been completely withdrawn from the three insurgency-hit states but will continue to be in force in some areas of the three states.
Glimpses of the CWC meeting, which was meant to formulate a plan to revive the party from the death throes of electoral irrelevance, but...
Election to fill up 55 seats in the Upper House of Parliament was to be held on March 26, but 37 candidates have already been elected without a contest.
The chief minister's statement came in the backdrop of tension between the two Northeastern states following alleged encroachment of land in Cachar district by the people of Mizoram.
A day after West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's comment that there was no United Progressive Alliance anymore, Kishor, who has earlier been political advisor to various parties, also called for democratically electing the opposition leadership.
Veteran Congress leader Digvijaya Singh and Bharatiya Janata Party candidates Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sumer Singh Solanki on Friday won Rajya Sabha election from Madhya Pradesh.
'Had the BJP gone along with the NPP, that would have eased the task of the Congress of winning more seats.' 'That was a great strategy of the BJP.' 'It helped the NPP get more seats than perhaps if it had gone as a pre-alliance partner with the BJP.'
The mandate which the people of Northeast have given is in itself is a very big change, Modi said.
Congress had a reason to smile as it was able to emerge as the single largest party in Meghalaya, but failed to secure a majority.
The Congress legislator, who is a COVID-19 patient, was the last one to cast his ballot wearing a PPE suit. He came to the assembly complex in an ambulance, the official said.
The Congress on Thursday declared 12 candidates for the Rajya Sabha polls, including party general secretary K C Venugopal, Deepender Hooda and senior Supreme Court advocate K T S Tulsi.
The Assam government has told the state assembly that the chief minister's residence atop Koinadhara Hills at Khanapara in Guwahati city, bordering Meghalaya, lies within the territory of Assam.
The run-up to the polls, which should have been a humdrum affair, became a cause celebre after it was marred by violence, arrests, sit-ins in far-away Delhi and a Supreme Court intervention asking officials to ensure peaceful polling.
During a fresh round of talks with North-East Democratic Alliance (NEDA) convenor Himanta Biswa Sarma earlier in the day, the NPP leaders stuck to their demand for change in the leadership of the BJP-led coalition government, they said.
'What is most distressing is that the revival of the economy, creation of more employment, and reducing poverty are not on the agenda of the government at all.' 'We are an economy on the verge of a demographic disaster.'
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday said she had suggested to the Congress that an advisory council comprising prominent personalities from civil society be set up to give a direction to the opposition, but rued that the plan did not materialise.
'The decline of the Congress party and its inability to play the lead role in Opposition politics has created a space for the TMC to expand.'
With Maharashtra and Haryana assembly elections, results for 51 assembly and two Lok Sabha bypolls spread across 18 states were declared on Thursday. Here are state-wise results of the bypolls.
According to the CEC, while Tripura will go to polls on February 23, the elections in Meghalaya will be held on March 3 and in Nagaland on March 5. The elections in all the three states will be held in a single phase and electronic voting machines will be used this year. While counting of votes for Tripura and Meghalaya is scheduled to be held on March 7, in Nagaland, the counting will take place a day later.
State BJP chief B S Yeddyurappa said the people of north-east in general and Tripura in particular have rejected the "corrupt and divisive" politics, practised by the Congress and the Communist Party of India-Marxist.
Assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat are over. Another set of state elections is due in 2018. Here's an assessment of the next round of the electoral challenge and how it could change India's political equations.
'She has just one objective. To win the next election. Nothing else matters.'
'The BJP capitalised on the Left Front's failure and inaction and the Congress' deliberate retreat in Tripura.'
China has long coveted Arunachal Pradesh, which it calls Southern Tibet. But, as Venkataraghavan Subha Srinivasan explains, in 1947, the present state of Arunachal Pradesh constituted the North East Frontier Tract of Assam. When India adopted its Constitution on 26 January 1950, NEFT became 'a separate politico-administrative entity' although it was constitutionally still a part of Assam. Its administration was brought directly under the President of India with the Governor of Assam acting as his agent. A revealing excerpt from his book The Origin Story of India's States.
The Congress leader later tweeted an apology.
Without doubt, the BJP is miles ahead in marshalling digital tools for electioneering better than any other party, observes Virendra Kapoor.
The prime minister on Wednesday addressed two election rallies of the party at Kohima in Nagaland and at Shillong in Meghalaya to woo voters before Assembly elections in both the hill states of the region.
Six constituencies speared across four north-eastern are currently casting their ballot in the second phase of the Lok Sabha elections.
While the term of 288-member Maharashtra assembly ends on November 9, that of the 90-member Haryana assembly expires on November 2.
Brisk polling began on Thursday morning in 91 constituencies spread across 18 states and two union territories in the first phase of Lok Sabha elections. As people queued up across the nation to cast their vote, there were some famous faces in the lines at different polling stations. Take a look.
The Nationalist Congress Party is likely to field former Lok Sabha speaker P A Sangma's daughter Agatha K Sangma to contest the byelections to the Tura Lok Sabha seat in Meghalaya. The byelection, scheduled to be held on May 22, has been necessitated after P A Sangma quit the Lok Sabha after being elected as MLA in the 60-member Meghalaya Legislative Assembly on March 8.
Bharatiya Janata Party leaders were enthused after they ousted the Left government in Tripura and scored positively in Nagaland too. Here are reactions from the party leaders.
The opposition parties snatched the high-profile Kairana LS seat in from BJP with a united force.
The four MLAs, accompanied by Sangma and BJP's trouble-shooter and Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, visited the Raj Bhavan in the afternoon to submit letter of support to the BJP-led government.
The culling of key state leaders and bureaucrats has given rise to distrust and uneasiness in Pramod Sawant's style of functioning, notes Aditi Phadnis.
In 2018, the BJP's rare successes in north-east India aside, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong for the party.
The Election Commission has deployed 36 observers for monitoring the flow of illegal cash and other inducements during the upcoming assembly polls in Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura. The officials have been deputed by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (Income Tax department) and Central Board of Excise and Customs (Customs and Excise department) and will act as Election Expenditure Observers, a senior Revenue department official said.
Sangma was a nine-time member of Lok Sabha and the Speaker in the 11th Lok Sabha. He had also held important portfolios in the central government.
There are 8,97,394 active cases of COVID-19, which is 20.53 per cent of the total caseload in the country, the data stated.
The MNF came to power in the state winning 26 of the 40 seats in the state assembly uprooting the Congress from its last bastion in the Northeast.
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