Congress is the only other horse in the race for national power, never mind how distant. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah know better than to take the Congress lightly, observes Shekhar Gupta.
Modi, while speaking at a poll rally in Gujarat on Sunday, had sought to link the dinner meeting hosted by Aiyar for Pakistani dignitaries and attended by Manmohan Singh, among others, with the ongoing assembly polls and a conspiracy against the BJP.
President Ram Nath Kovind, Vice President Venkaiah Naidu and other top leaders paid rich tributes to senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who died on Saturday.
Describing Shiv Sena as a "natural ally", BJP dropped hints that it would prefer the estranged saffron party to be a partner in its government in Maharashtra even while Nationalist Congress Party's unconditional support continues to be on offer.
Former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh, former defence minister AK Antony, senior leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma also took part in the protest sporting black bands.
Not all Opposition parties on board, say they are once bitten, twice shy.
The move is being seen as an attempt to forge opposition unity to defeat the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.
'For the Shiv Sena, Hindutva is like a shawl which can be put on and discarded at will.'
'Time and again, through their actions, often more covert than overt, the BJP has shown that it is a power-hungry party and its hunger isn't getting satiated sitting in the Opposition.'
BJP claimed close to 116 lawmakers from rival parties appeared to have voted for Kovind.
Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com gives the lowdown on the constituencies going to polls in the first phase on April 11.
The septuagenarian politician, once the right hand man of Bal Thackeray, is now battling irrelevance in a Balasaheb-less Shiv Sena
Top leaders of political parties were on Thursday briefed by the government about the surgical strike carried out by the army on terror launching pads across the Line of Control to foil plans of terrorists to target some Indian towns.
Protests by various parties could be seen as they demanded the Prime Minister Narendra Modi rolled back the demonetisation scheme.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi said that the 'opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance' set fire to Jammu and Kashmir, killing many innocent civilians and brave soldiers, and that the damage would continue even if the state was put under central rule.
'The BJP is trying to bribe or unleash the income tax authorities (on us).'
More and more Congressmen are breaking their silence and coming out in the open blaming party vice president Rahul Gandhi for the poll drubbing. Renu Mittal reports.
'There is no future for the Shiv Sena under Uddhavji's leadership.'
"Any fight with the Congress will remain in the state. At the national level, we will fight together, this I am saying from the heart..." she said.
The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday took up the four bills related to the GST, with the Opposition urging the government to insulate taxpayers from harassment and questioning how the new regime was "ideal" when 40 per cent of the revenue base of the GDP was kept out of its purview.
Hours after 21 ministers took the oath of office and became a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ministry, speculation began on which minister would be handed which portfolio. However, all speculation ended after the list was announced.
Rajnath Singh led the delegation of 26 MPs from 20 parties which stayed overnight in Srinagar before stopping over in Jammu this afternoon.
Maharashtra politics is at crossroads. Anything can happen in this dynamic situation. Uddhav will have to prove he is a worthy inheritor of his father's legacy and keep his cadre and leaders in the party stable. Fadnavis will have to prove that manoeuvrings on floor of the house was an inevitable political necessity to change the destiny of Maharashtra eventually. Modi and Shah will have to show that they can and will are resist use of 'the system' in the pursuit of power. Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com analyses the situation.
The Insurance penetration in India is very low at 3.9 per cent.
"(Former PM) Atal Bihari Vajpayee said 'raj dharma' was not followed in Gujarat (during the 2002 riots). Now, 'raj dharma' is not being followed in case of Andhra Pradesh. We have been denied what was rightfully ours," he claimed.
India as a large country should have inter-modal connectivity, which will help us make travel easier, safer and seamless. That is how you will also gain. You will gain more money, make more revenues, says Praful Patel.
As the dust finally settles on the outcome of the Lok Sabha elections 2019 and Bharatiya Janata Party along with its NDA allies emerges as the clear winner, here is a list of who won in each of the 7 phases of elections.
In a television interview, Union minister Jairam Ramesh claimed that a state of UP's size was ungovernable
It, however, lags other states on crucial parameters such as health care and rural poverty.
'For short-term gain, the BJP makes extraordinary promises, they take extraordinary decisions, but in the long term it is going to impact both them and the country.'
'No one talks about the Mumbai riots anymore, though like Delhi 1984, the guilty have not been punished. In Gujarat, many powerful leaders of the state's ruling party are in jail for their role in the riots... In Mumbai, only one politician of the Shiv Sena, a former MP, was convicted of hate speech, along with two other Shiv Sainiks, one of whom was a corporator and the other a junior functionary... So why the apathy? Could it be because despite these statistics and the widely-publicised findings of the Srikrishna Commission, what remained in public consciousness was the violence by the Muslims, thanks to a highly efficient Sena propaganda machine? There's no demand for it, but would an SIT probe into the closed cases of the Mumbai riots help today?' The fadeout of Mumbai's riots from public debate can be called a triumph of the communal State, argues Jyoti Punwani.
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