Janata Dal-United on Wednesday suspended two Lok Sabha MPs, Jai Narayan Nishad and Purnmasi Ram, from the party for six years on charge of engaging in anti-party activities.
Majority of these constituencies are in Uttar Pradesh and the party that is on the third slot even as the counting is still underway on several seats is the Bahujan Samaj Party, a party neither with the National Democratic Alliance nor the opposition INDIA bloc.
While a few 'bahubalis' managed wins in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, a majority of them were rejected by the voters. According to the results, many alleged dons-turned-politicians failed to make it to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly.
Cracking the whip, Janta Dal-United on Thursday expelled outgoing Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament and senior leader Shivanand Tiwari and four Lok Sabha MPs for anti-party activities.
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.
'There was a strong undercurrent of deprivation, and also frustration against misuse of power and authority.' 'This election was an opportunity for the manifestation of this discontentment.'
The Bharatiya Janata Party-backed Samajwadi Party rebel candidate Nitin Agarwal was elected deputy speaker of the Uttar Pradesh assembly on Monday, defeating Narendra Verma, the official candidate of Akhilesh Yadav's party, by 244 votes.
In his maiden foray in the state election, Yadav won from the Karhal assembly seat by a margin of 67,504 votes.
rivals Congress, JMM and TMC and Samajwadi Party.
In the event of a triangular contest the winning party will need about 40 per cent of the votes polled. And it is here that the votes of the numerically smaller communities will come into play.
For the post of deputy chief minister, the names of Swatantra Dev Singh, Baby Rani Maurya, Brijesh Pathak and Keshav Prasad Maurya are in talks.
'The Mallahs may remain divided between the two competing coalitions in Bihar,' says Mohammad Sajjad.
Alleging that the BJP would end democracy if it was not voted out, Kharge said it was because of this democracy that a tea-seller's son could become the prime minister of India and he, the son of a labourer, could become the president of the opposition Congress.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi would have got a tough fight in Varanasi had Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra contested against him as Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) candidate, feel party workers from the temple town.
Besides the national capital, polling will be held Saturday in 14 seats in Uttar Pradesh, all 10 seats of Haryana, eight seats each in Bihar and West Bengal, six seats in Odisha, four seats in Jharkhand and one seat in Jammu and Kashmir. Simultaneously, polling will be held for 42 assembly constituencies in Odisha.
Bharatiya Janata Party leader Maneka Gandhi on Saturday indicated that her son Varun Gandhi's writings that were sometimes critical of the government may have cost him the party's Lok Sabha ticket from Pilibhit but asserted that he would do very well even without it.
Voting for the seventh and final phase of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections covering 54 seats, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi's parliamentary constituency Varanasi, will be held on Monday to decide the phase of 613 candidates.
If the Congress reached 90, it would have a pretty good chance of holding the BJP below the 272 mark. A hundred seats will rock national politics, argues Shekhar Gupta.
Yogi expands UP Cabinet in attempt to balance caste, regional aspirations head of the assembly polls early next year.
Umesh Pal, the prime witness in the 2005 murder of Bahujan Samaj Party MLA Raju Pal, was shot dead outisde his residence in Prayagraj, the police said.
The BJP is banking on development. The opposition is raking up caste identities and the dangers of hyper nationalism.
The analysis of five candidates could not be completed as their affidavits are either badly scanned or complete affidavits are not uploaded on the Election Commission of India website, they said.
The bypolls are termed as a 'rehearsal' for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls by CM Yogi Adityanath.
With the second list, the total number of candidates declared by the Congress went up to 83 out of the total of 90.
The BJP stormed back to power in the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, trouncing its main rival SP, with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath asserting that people have buried the politics of caste and religion.
Voting for the seventh and final round will be held on March 7 for Varanasi and its eight adjoining districts.
The bypolls were conducted for two Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, one each in Meghalaya and Odisha and the Jalandhar Lok Sabha constituency in Punjab.
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.
Swami Prasad Maurya, who recently stirred controversy over his remarks on Ramcharitmanas, and veteran leader Azam Khan are also among the 14 national general secretaries.
Sources in various parties suggest that two lakh votes of the Patel community, locally known as OBC kurmi, for which mother-daughter led Apna Dal (S) and Apna Dal (K) are competing and over one lakh of OBC Rajbhars would be crucial in deciding the outcome of the assembly seats in Varanasi.
Congress veteran Kapil Sibal had on Wednesday filed his nomination as an SP-backed Independent candidate for the Rajya Sabha polls.
Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra appears to have shed the maximum sweat among top leaders for over the last 45 days in the seven-phase Uttar Pradesh assembly elections campaign.
The SP's bid to dent the BJP's formidable social equation is playing out in a big way in the Poorvanchal or eastern region of Uttar Pradesh as the ruling party is working overtime to keep its caste equation unharmed.
The curtain came down on rumbustious electioneering over the last two months when assembly polls were also held in four other states - Goa, Uttarakhand, Punjab and Manipur.
BJP candidate Kedar Prasad Gupta defeated Manoj Singh Kushwaha of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal-United by 3,645 votes in Kurhani.
Polling in 70 constituencies began at 8 am and will conclude at 5 pm, except in nine polling booths in the Maoist-affected Bindranawagarh seat in Gariaband district, where voting began at 7 for security reasons, a poll official said.
The Uttar Pradesh police on Monday gunned down one of the accused in the sensational February 24 killing of a prime witness in the 2005 murder case of then Bahujan Samaj Party MLA Raju Pal in an encounter in Prayagraj.
The ministers who failed to find places in the second term of the BJP government in the state included Dinesh Sharma, Satish Mahana, Ashutosh Tandon, Shrikant Sharma, Siddharth Nath Singh, and others.
RLD sources said that the party chief was "taken aback" by the SP's delay in announcing his name as the candidate for the Rajya Sabha elections.
