The BJP is far more prepared than the Congress as their pool of prospective candidates is much bigger, reports Prakash Bhandari.
Congress legislators continued their sit-in protest inside the assembly while the party held protests at all district headquarters on Saturday against the suspension of six party MLAs.
A regular morning alive with the chatter of students assembling for prayers quickly turned into tragedy on Friday when a portion of their government school building collapsed, killing seven children and injuring 27, some of them critically.
'Rahul Gandhi's problem is that he doesn't think big.' 'He looks more like an activist, while politics is like a game of chess. You attack and then defend and have a game-plan.'
'The question for the TMC is not whether it can hold its bastions, but whether it can expand effectively into regions where the BJP already possesses a good ecosystem.'
The development comes after Congress cracked down on Sachin Pilot, stripping the dissident leader of the posts of Rajasthan's deputy chief minister and the party's state unit president, and sacking two loyalists from the state Cabinet.
The BJP's nationwide vote share saw its steepest decline in Rajasthan, falling by 9.23% from 2019, resulting in the loss of 11 seats.
The meeting was attended by Congress in-charge for Rajasthan Sukhjinder Randhawa, CM Gehlot, RPCC president Govind Singh Dotasra and other leaders.
According to the police, the bus was speeding and filled with passengers due to which the driver lost control and the vehicle rammed into the wing wall of the flyover.
The Congress high command has called senior leader Kamal Nath to Delhi and he is likely to meet party chief Sonia Gandhi on Monday, sources said.
In a major organisational revamp, the Congress on Friday appointed former Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel as general secretary in-charge of Punjab and Rajya Sabha MP Syed Naseer Hussain as general secretary for Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
Apart from being the CM twice earlier, he has won a series of Lok Sabha and assembly elections from the state and headed the Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee four times.
"The Congress is "going to (fight) the election with unity" and it will win the polls," Sharma said after the meeting at Pilot's Civil Lines residence that lasted for nearly half an hour.
BJP MP and actor Ravi Kishan has been awarded the Sansad Ratna for his outstanding performance in the Lok Sabha, becoming the first actor-turned-politician to receive the honour.
Former deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot, who has been involved in a leadership tussle with Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, skipped his interaction.
The accident occurred when the car, in which Abrar Ahmed was travelling from Jaipur to Jhalawar, collided head on with a truck.
Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and some of his cabinet colleagues, including Shanti Dhariwal, figure in the list of 63 Congress candidates for the forthcoming assembly polls, announced by the All India Congress Committee.
The Congress refrained from commenting on any peace formula between Gehlot and Pilot.
The panel, headed by Congress MP Saptagiri Sankar Ulaka, had called Patkar to hear her views on the implementation and effectiveness of the land acquisition law enacted by Parliament when the Congress-led UPA government was in power in 2013.
The Ashok Gehlot-led Congress government will have a total of 30 ministers, including 18 who had resigned earlier.
Rajasthan Congress leaders Jyoti Mirdha and Sawai Singh Chaudhary switched to the Bharatiya Janata Party in Jaipur on Monday ahead of assembly elections due later this year.
Miffed over the Congress central leadership nominating poet-politician Imran Pratapgarhi, who hails from Uttar Pradesh, as its candidate from Maharashtra for the upcoming Rajya Sabha polls, party functionary Ashish Deshmukh on Tuesday resigned from the post of Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee general secretary.
After Punjab, the party high command has shifted its focus to Rajasthan, where demands for Cabinet expansion and political appointments gained momentum after reports of resentment in the camp led by former deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot, who along with 18 MLAs had rebelled against the leadership of Gehlot last year.
Kanugolu had also made forays in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh following a directive from the party's central leadership but regional satraps Ashok Gehlot and Kamal Nath reportedly were not on the same page as the poll strategist.
"I sometimes think of leaving it, but the chief minister's post doesn't leave me," Ashok Gehlot famously said earlier this year, in part as a signal to the Congress top brass not to pick someone else for the job if the party wins the assembly polls.
State Congress chief Govind Singh Dotasra, who along with two other ministers had offered to resign in a letter to party's national president Sonia Gandhi, had moved a proposal in this regard at the beginning of the meeting following which all ministers resigned.
With all eyes on the Congress's next step in Rajasthan after Sachin Pilot's fast in Jaipur on Tuesday, AICC in-charge of state Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa on Wednesday said he agrees with the issue of corruption taken up by Pilot but the manner in which it was raised was not right.
Gaurav Gogoi will head the screening committee for Rajasthan with Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and former deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot included among the ex-officio members of the panel.
The BJP said that the decision will not have any impact on the party's prospects in western Rajasthan.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi met Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and his deputy Sachin Pilot separately.
Govind Singh Dotasra, Harish Chaudhary and Raghu Sharma have already offered their resignations in writing to Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Friday.
At its Jaipur meeting, the BJP will focus on this year's assembly elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh while the Congress's Chintan Shivir in Udaipur will discuss how it can resurrect itself.
'There may be some planted stories here or there, people trying to create manufactured controversies but the party is fully united. We will make sure the yatra is even more successful than it has been in other states'
While Gehlot is learnt to be leading the race for chief minister's post, Pilot is also putting up stiff resistance and is staking his claim.
This comes a day after he targeted the saffron party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, asking why they were not chanting 'Jai Siyaram' and 'Hey Ram'.
Look carefully at Gehlot and Pilot's faces at Tuesday's press conference at the Pradesh Congress committee office on Hospital Road in Jaipur, and you can guess how long the truce will last.
The Congress leadership is moving towards implementing the one-man one-post norm when the All India Congress Committee and Pradesh Congress Committees are reconstituted, said highly placed sources in the AICC.
The nomination is an indication that the veteran Congress leader is not sure of victory from Raebareli, the Lok Sabha constituency she has represented for five terms.
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