Besides Karnataka, states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Assam, West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya have already announced area-wise lockdown for different durations.
Actor-politician Shatrughan Sinha, who joined the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha election, lost to Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad from Patna Sahib constituency in Bihar by 2.84 votes.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi launched a fresh attack on Bharatiya Janata Party prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi on Tuesday, saying 'the BJP leader is crossing all limits to mislead people'.
Decorated lights decked up buildings and earthen lamps dotted houses as people across the country celebrated Diwali.
'A loss of seats for the Trinamool in this election will weaken its hold in Bengal, which will not augur well before the assembly election in 2021.'
One person was on Thursday killed in a clash between Trinamool Congress and Communist Party of India-Marxist supporters in North Dinajpur district during the fifth and final phase of West Bengal panchayat elections, taking the toll in poll-related violence to 21 since the exercise began.
'If the BJP thinks it is going to overnight transform Bengal into Madhya Pradesh, sorry, that's not going to happen because I have faith in our ethos and culture.'
Banerjee had on Saturday invited the agitators for closed-door talks, but the offer was turned down by them.
'Who are these people on the streets?' 'They are youth and students who were hoodwinked, bluffed by Modi for the last seven years, with a promise of 2 crore jobs every year.' 'And Mamata sings the same tune.' 'But the youth can see that as long as there is Mamata or Modi, there is no hope.'
BJP won 18 of the seats while the TMC won 22 of the seats.
In the second phase on April 18, 97 seats,spread across 13 states and one Union Territory, will go to the polls.
The Congress's share has almost halved, down from 12 in 2014 to six now.
The desecration of Vidyasagar's statue during Amit Anilchandra Shah's rally, which the TMC projected to be a 'Bhojpuri' and 'Dhokla' invasion on West Bengal's culture, may help her gain some favour with middle-class and erudite Bengalis in the last phase of the polls.
'How many Indian parents, still alive, really have documents of, their parents's date and place of birth? Not more than 27% of still alive Indians have got birth certificates,' points out Mohammad Sajjad.
'Even Mamtadi would react to the rising statistics of crimes against women and rape with the same horror as I did if she stops being a politician protecting her position and looks at the problem as a woman.'
Barring Maharashtra, the poll percentage in rest of the states was in excess of 60 per cent while in Puducherry it was 80.47 per cent.
The Lok Sabha election will be held in 7 phases, beginning on April 11, 2019 and ending on May 19, 2019.
Here's a list of the full first-time ministers in the second term of the Narendra Modi government.
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.
West Bengal was the second-most industrialised state in terms of value added and first in terms of number of factories and employment even in the mid-1960s. With a severe and long process of deindustrialisation, it lost its primacy.
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