Four 20km race walkers -- two men and two women -- have already been named from the separate national championships held in New Delhi in February.
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.
Coming as it does only months ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, the Chennai meet could provide the launch pad for a national alternative to the BJP-NDA, and MK Stalin may be given the credit for getting it going, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Taking exception to Health Minister Harsh Vardhan not mentioning the death of healthcare workers due to Covid-19 in his statement in Parliament, the Indian Medical Association has published a list of 382 doctors who died due to the viral disease and demanded that they be treated as "martyrs".
'Modi and Shah know their politics. That is why the alarmed switch to reservations, and raising the threat from 'vote bank' politics,' says Shekhar Gupta.
Opposition parties in Parliament on Monday vociferously protested the "snooping" on Rahul Gandhi, with the government dismissing their contention saying they were making a "mountain out of what is not even a molehill", leading the Congress to walk out of Rajya Sabha.
Now that Tamil Nadu's tallest politician is no more, it remains to be seen how new political re-alignments could shape up, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Rediff.com republishes an old interview of the cartoonist on politics
'Like it or not, the Congress is still the only party with the potential to challenge the BJP at a pan-Indian level,' says T V R Shenoy.
With President Pranab Mukherjee voicing his objection to the 'ordinance route', senior ministers met here on Tuesday to discuss how to ensure that the ordinances issued recently are followed up with legislative action in the upcoming budget session in February.
'He totally gets the Gandhis...' 'If anything, he pays too much attention to the Gandhis.' 'I feel that in places like UP, where the Congress doesn't matter, he often spends time blasting the Gandhis.'
'This is a new phenomenon,' says Shekhar Gupta. 'Does it point to the rise of egomania, and could it also be a reason our politics is broken and Parliament non-functional? Where our biggest leaders talk not to, but at each other.'
In the third reshuffle since coming to power, Prime Minister Modi raised the strength of his Council of Ministers from 73 to 76.
'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.'
