Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa's political rivals are sharply divided over appealing against her acquittal in a disproportionate assets case that saw her return to power for a fifth time two days ago.
Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh speaks about the shortcomings of the Grand Old Party, and puts up a brave defence for party vice president Rahul Gandhi in this freewheeling chat with the Indian Express
'If the leadership gets wrong information, what results you can expect?'
The new Congress president is building a core team of youngsters while waiting for his mother's coterie to retire, reports R Rajagopalan.
The decision was taken keeping in mind the party norm that no CPI-M leader can represent the party in the Upper House for more than two terms.
The development came a day after the protesting farmers rejected the Centre's offer to start talks as soon as they move to Burari and continued to stay put Singhu and Tikri borders of the national capital.
Several parties had requested that the session, which was originally scheduled to continue till April 8, be curtailed due to the five assembly elections being held in eight phases till April 29.
Coming out against the report of the Supreme Court-appointed Empowered Committee on Mullaperiyar dam, over which Kerala and Tamil Nadu are at loggerheads, Communist Party of India-Marxist veteran V S Achuthanandan on Monday said it was "unilateral and in favour of Tamil Nadu".
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi has called a meeting of chief ministers of 12 Congress-ruled states to figure out how to fill out the vacancies in the Rajya Sabha. Highly-placed sources have said that he wants to cajole Amethis's former feudal lord Sanjay Singh; by giving him an RS ticket, in view of his own weak position in Amethi. Renu Mittal reports.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Friday urged top opposition leaders to rise above political compulsions to take on the BJP in the interest of the nation and start planning "systematically" to realise the "ultimate goal" of winning the 2024 Lok Sabha polls
Unlike the regimes of Jayalalitha, Palaniswami and Karunanidhi, ministers are actually getting to make decisions on their own, with the unmentioned rider that they would be held responsible and accountable, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Karnataka has stopped releasing Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu since Sunday evening, Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar told the assembly on Monday.Shettar said the government had filed a review petition in the Supreme Court on its recent directive and challenged the Cauvery Monitoring Committee order.
Higher education policy may be at the core of the Tamil Nadu assembly polls next May, with a potential to break the ties between the ruling AIADMK in the state and the BJP counterpart at the national level, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Gadgil and the report prepared by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) headed by him are back in news after over two dozen people lost their lives in landslides and flash floods in the past few days in the hilly regions of Western Ghats in central Kerala districts of Kottayam and Idukki.
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam President M K Stalin will try his luck once again from Kolathur constituency in Chennai in the April 6 Tamil Nadu assembly elections while his son Udhayanidhi will make his electoral debut by contesting from the Chepauk-Triplicane segment in the metropolis.
Second-line AIADMK leaders and cadres alike say that by starting the talks first with the BJP and committing the party to an alliance without discussing seat-sharing, the leadership might have commenced the coalition discourse at the wrong end. According to them, even 20 seats for the BJP may be too many, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Twenty-two proposals comprising 16 states and Union Territories and six ministries and departments have been shortlisted for participation in the parade after a series of five meetings.
The Supreme Court Monday rued the 'general practice' of speakers delaying decisions on pleas seeking disqualification of lawmakers and the subsequent arguments that courts should 'stay away,' while hoping that the West Bengal assembly speaker would decide on such a plea against Mukul Roy who defected to the Trinamool Congress from the Bharatiya Janata Party after the state polls.
Hundreds of migrant workers from Delhi, Haryana and even Punjab reached Anand Vihar, Ghazipur and Ghaziabad's Lal Kuan area after taking arduous treks of many kilometers on foot to take buses to their respective native places
'They plan to purchase votes.' 'We will not purchase people, but win the elections.' 'In our manifesto there are no free gifts. It says what we will do for the people.'
RJD president Lalu Prasad on Thursday said Railway Budget has cheated people as it has nothing to offer.
'Wayanad has become famous because of Rahul Gandhi.'
'No, that is not an abbreviation for the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha,' says T V R Shenoy, 'but for J Jayalalithaa-Mamata Banerjee-Mayawati-Mulayam Singh Yadav... If the AIADMK, the Trinamool Congress, and other regional forces do extremely well, we could be heading for a repetion of the 9th Lok Sabha (1989 to 1991) and the 11th Lok Sabha (1996 to 1998), each of which saw multiple prime ministers and neither of which lasted even half of its five-year term.'
Ayyakannu, who is also president of the National South Indian Rivers Inter-Linking Farmers Association, said the decision to contest the polls from Uttar Pradesh was to urge the Bharatiya Janata Party to include in their manifesto that their demands, including "profitable prices for farm produce," would be fulfilled.
Many leaders from non-Hindi states, especially Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, had opposed the policy.
Lalu Prasad on Monday met Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi for the second time this month amid indications that the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress were working out the nitty-gritty of forging a "secular alliance" in Bihar.
Rahul Gandhi's birthday greeting to the DMDK supremo signifies that the Congress vice president is expanding his ambit of functioning and graduating from handling just organisational affairs, reports Anita Katyal.
'In the hands of a majoritarian government, with utter contempt for the cultural plurality and diversity of our great nation, the pipe dream of making Hindi the sole official language takes on nightmarish proportions.'
Among the 36 new faces in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's council of ministers, eight are lawyers, four are doctors, two former IAS officers and four MBA degree holders, besides several engineers, making it an eclectic mix of professionals.
The reshuffle had politics at its heart, so the biggest complement of new ministers, both Cabinet rank and below, came from UP, which will see assembly elections in a few months.
The DMK parliamentary party appears to be a house divided, reports R Rajagopalan.
Back of the envelope calculations put government expense on each of the new schemes promised by the DMK and the AIADMK at tens of thousands of crores. But then, neither party has said how they are going to also address the mounting debt burden either, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
'The protesters took out a march carrying black flags. They burnt Prime Minister Narendra Modi's effigy while raising slogans against the three farm laws'
Kerala is one state where the Congress may do well in the general election and it where Rahul Gandhi has demonstrated why he is serious about rebuilding his party, says T V R Shenoy.
Indications are that Modi will have words of encouragement for Stalin, and the meeting is likely to be much less acrimonious than critics of either would want it to be. notes N Sathiya Moorthy.
As fuel prices continue its northward march with petrol and diesel being sold at Rs 80.73 and Rs 72.83 per litre in the national capital, at least 21 opposition parties, led by the Congress have staged a Bharat Bandh protesting the rise in fuel prices and depreciation of the rupee.
The ruling party seems in far better shape than the Congress, which is yet to finalise seat-sharing agreements in several states.
Though the wily TRS supremo, credited with achieving the separate state of Telangana, stopped short of saying he was about to declare dissolution of the assembly, none doubted its imminence.
'The party dropped me as a spokesperson for showing a roadmap. It shows that the party either has a high level of arrogance or they are completely detached from ground realities.'
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