Habib operates more than 850 salons and around 65 hair academies across 115 cities across India.
Rampur Sadar and Khatauli in Uttar Pradesh, Padampur in Odisha, Sardarshahar in Rajasthan, Kurhani in Bihar and Bhanupratappur in Chhattisgarh are the assembly seats where the bypolls are being held.
Mayawati said both the BJP and the SP indulged in empty talks to win the votes of Dalits and Brahmins, but neither safeguarded their interests when in power.
Tikait has been at loggerheads with various governments on a range of farmers' issues, including loan waivers, minimum support price, power tariff and land acquisition in states such as UP, Haryana Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh.
Amid the ongoing farmers protest at the Delhi borders, Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is set to attend kisan mahapanchayat in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur district on Wednesday.
As many as 623 candidates, including 73 women are in the fray in the first phase and around 2.28 core voters, including 1.24 crore men and 1.04 crore women are eligible to caste their francise, election officials said.
Attacking the Samajwadi Party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said it supported rioters and the mafia, and fielded criminals in western Uttar Pradesh for the assembly elections.
Though a number of Jat leaders and farmers said they would vote against the BJP in the upcoming panchayat election, slated for April, they remained non-committal on supporting opposition parties in the assembly polls next year.
'It was a terrible experience to survive the war for 13 days'
While the RLD has fought the just-concluded polls in tie up with the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party, the office-bearers of the BKU, which was part of the anti-farm laws protest against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Centre, insists it is an 'apolitical' group.
The poll results will depend much on whether the caste and community coalition worked out by Akhilesh can withstand the onslaught of the Hindutva forces who have increased their efforts to polarise the electorate on communal lines.
Jayant Chaudhary has plenty of time to make his own mistakes. But this election is a crucial test of his leadership.
Electoral politics is going to be an important part of farmer protests going forward.
On the lines of Delhi's Shaheen Bagh, around 50 women along with children have been squatting near the Clock Tower in Lucknow's old quarters. The women protesters alleged that blankets provided to them by some organisations were taken away by police. The police dismissed the allegations.
The local, district and police administration are reaching out to meat traders to ensure this, officials said.
Asaduddin Owaisi's AIMIM, which is going to contest next year's Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls on the promise of creating leadership among Muslims, has created unease in the political parties that so far considered the members of the minority community as their core "vote bank".
Under Election Commission guidelines, campaigning has to end 48 hours before the close of polls for each phase.
However, the RLD leader gave a terse response. 'Invite those +700 farmer families which you have destroyed, not me,' he tweeted in Hindi.
"I asked the police to let them go even if they don't have the papers," he said.
Rather than lose direction with the Karnal protest, farmers decided to focus more on UP to defeat the BJP in the forthcoming assembly elections there, reports Nitin Kumar.
The marble railing of the main mausoleum and red sandstone railings suffered damage due to thunderstorm.
Hansika Shukla from Ghaziabad and Karishma Arora from Muzaffarnagar scored 499 out of 500 marks to top the CBSE Class 12 results this year.
The Rashtriya Lok Dal has chosen educated candidates hailing from the constituency and with no criminal background, while partner the Samajwadi Party picked them on their 'winnability' factor as the alliance announced the first list of nominees for the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls.
'A political party taking the law into its hands is objectionable, especially in the context of the 2002 incidents in Gujarat.'
In a statement issued in Lucknow, the UP government said, 'Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has directed that the National Security Act be slapped against the accused persons. He also directed that loss of public money during the construction work be recovered from the contractor and engineers.'
Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair on Thursday moved the Supreme Court seeking the quashing of six FIR lodged against him in several districts of Uttar Pradesh.
Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) supporters stayed put on the Delhi-Meerut Expressway on Friday as the crowd swelled there, notwithstanding the Ghaziabad administration's ultimatum to vacate the UP Gate protest site where security force in large numbers was re-deployed.
The Centre on Wednesday made it clear that it has no input suggesting that Pakistan's intelligence agency Inter Services Intelligence had contacted victims of riots in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh.
Gag orders have a "chilling effect" on the freedom of speech, the apex court said while refusing to accept the submission of the counsel representing Uttar Pradesh that Zubair be barred from tweeting when he is on bail.
Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra asked the Bharatiya Janata Party why are they preventing peasants from coming to Delhi to raise their demands.
Extended rounds of negotiations having failed, farm leaders now reckon that their best chance to pressure the government lay in defeating the BJP in the coming assembly poll, particularly in UP, observes Virendra Kapoor.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday granted bail to Alt News Co-founder Mohammad Zubair in all first information reports (FIRs) lodged in Uttar Pradesh against him concerning his alleged derogatory tweets.
'With vendetta politics as its main plank, the BJP will be looking out for every opportunity to destabilise this Mahagatbandhan government.'
The farmers lifted blockades on highways at Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur borders and took out a 'Victory March' to celebrate the repeal of three contentious farm laws and the Centre's written assurance to fulfil their other demands, including constituting a committee for legal guarantee on minimum support price (MSP) for crops.
In the dangal of UP politics, much as Muzaffarnagar wants to leave its past behind, the shadows are never be far behind.
'Yogi was there, but ultimately the BJP got extremely worried and therefore Modi pitched in.'
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is headed for a big win in the Uttar Pradesh legislative council polls, bagging Barabanki and Ayodhya and leading in several other places. But it lost Varanasi to an Independent candidate.
Controversial Hindutva leader Sadhvi Prachi on Tuesday termed Shah Rukh Khan as a "Pakistani agent", who should be sent to that country.
Zubair through his counsel submitted that this is an age of social media where news travels faster than lightning and the job of someone who is debunking false information may draw the ire of others but "the law cannot be weaponisd against him.
The Supreme Court on Monday said it would hear on July 20 a plea by Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair, seeking to quash FIRs lodged against him in Uttar Pradesh for allegedly outraging religious feelings, and directed that no precipitative steps be taken against him in the meantime.
