Samajwadi Party leader Swami Prasad Maurya on Tuesday said he had spoken on a particular verse in Ramcharitmanas and not about Lord Ram or any religion, but refused to retract the comments which have triggered a row and embarrassed his party.
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.
Spread over 10 districts, polling in these constituencies will be held from 7 am till 6 pm on Thursday.
At least 20 passengers were on Monday feared killed as the Gorakhdham Express rammed into a stationary freight train in the district. The incident occurred on Monday morning when the express train came on the same track as the freight train near Chureb Railway Station, District Magistrate Bharat Lal said.
The sixth round of Uttar Pradesh assembly polls will see voting for 57 seats on Thursday sealing the fate of political heavyweights such as Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the Congress' Ajay Kumar Lallu and Samajwadi Party's Swami Prasad Maurya.
The BJP's losses in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where the UP CM had addressed nearly 75 rallies, has put a big question mark on his ability to deliver in high-octane contests, reports Virendra Singh Rawat.
The elections are being seen as a semi-final to the 2022 assembly election.
'In this assembly election, Muslims here will vote for one who works, but also one who safeguards their identity.' 'Their existence is more important they feel, than a faulty light meter. So yes, a Muslim representative will make a difference.'
Nishad party president Sanjay Nishad, who had demanded deputy chief minister post but settled with his nomination as an MLC, thanked the BJP on Monday and said his party will ensure the NDA's victory in next year's Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls.
The BJP and the Nishad Party will contest the upcoming assembly polls together in Uttar Pradesh and will work towards forming the next government in the state, Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Friday.
The districts going to polls in this phase are Balrampur, Gonda, Faizabad, Ambedkar Nagar, Bahraich, Shravasti, Basti, Siddharth Nagar, Sant Kabir Nagar, Amethi and Sultanpur.
In Khufiya, a mother's journey, a lover's vendetta and a country's mission, skewed patriotism and moral disengagement coalesce and highlight the nature of the spying business, notes Sukanya Verma.
Celebrating the poet-saint's legacy in our times.
Operations at the Delhi airport remained normal. However, three flights were returned or diverted to the Delhi airport due to bad weather in Chandigarh, Varanasi and Lucknow on Tuesday night.
Taking cognisance of their alleged controversial remarks against Narendra Modi and Azam Khan respectively in election speeches, the Election Commission on Thursday issued show cause notices to Union minister Beni Prasad Verma and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Vinay Katiyar for prima facie violating the Model Code of Conduct.
A convict in the 1993 Mumbai serial bomb blasts case, Jalees Ansari, who went "missing" while on parole, was arrested on Friday from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, an official said. Ansari (68), a Mumbai resident who was serving a life term in a Rajasthan jail, was nabbed in a joint operation by Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Sqaud and the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (STF), he said.
Ravi Kishan, the BJP's candidate, is an outsider. The BSP-SP candidate is from the powerful Nishad community. Yogi faces a tough task in ensuring that the Gorakhpur seat, which he represented from 1998 to 2017, stays with the BJP.
Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister and former state BJP president Keshav Prasad Maurya had also dropped a hint in a recent tweet, saying Yaduvanshi (Yadavs), Ravidasiyo (Jatavs) and Pasmanda Muslims will be brought closer to the BJP so that the lotus 'blossoms' in every booth in UP.
The second list has named 16 candidates from Uttar Pradesh and five from Maharashtra.
At least 11 people lost their lives in Uttar Pradesh as monsoon rains lashed most parts of north India, with several rivers in the region flowing above the danger mark.
In Phase 6, indications are that the BJP, which is defending 40 seats, will lose in double digits and gain in single digits. Not good, if you are the ruling party scrambling to earn a working majority, with just one phase left to go, argues Prem Panicker.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted protection from coercive action to AAP leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh in alleged hate speech cases lodged against him in UP.
Sharing dais with the chief minister during poll rallies, the BJP candidate is often seen standing alongside the 'maharaj' with folded hands.
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Rahul Gandhi's experiment of choosing Congress candidates for Lok Sabha polls through the 'primary' system appears to have suffered initial hiccups with two constituencies being dropped from the list of 16.
The polling for the sixth phase on May 12 covers 6 states and one Union Territory.
The party may announce Somen Mitra as the Lok Sabha candidate from North Kolkata whose name is set to be decided upon following intra-party elections to choose contenders -- a move initiated by the Congress vice-president to ensure transparency in ticket-distribution system. Renu Mittal reports.
Seventeen children died in the neo-natal ward, five in the acute encephalitis syndrome ward and eight in the general ward.
Taking serious note of the rampant corruption in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Uttar Pradesh, the Lucknow bench of Allahabad high court on Friday ordered a Central Bureau of Investogation probe into the alleged large scale financial bungling brought to its notice through a public interest litigation, moved by local journalist Sachchidanand Gupta .
He congratulated the Uttar Pradesh government and industrialists for their commitment for development.
The sky turned cloudy around 4:30pm and gusty winds swept the national capital.
The Samajwadi Party government went overboard in deploying nearly 10,000 policemen to patrol the streets of Ayodhya to prevent the VHP from carrying out its 84-kosi parikrama, reports Sharat Pradhan
As the Uttar Pradesh assembly election battle hits new lows, Rediff.com's Aslam Hunani walks you through all you need to know about the fifth phase of polling on February 27.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday enjoyed a boat ride with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the Ganga with a glimpse of the rich cultural heritage of the temple city.
The BJP is banking on development. The opposition is raking up caste identities and the dangers of hyper nationalism.
Besides the polarisation in favour of the BJP, there could be other reasons for the under-representation of Muslims too, says Shafeeq Rahman.
Shivpal loyalists have been denied tickets.
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan dashed off a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking his intervention for repealing the measure. He said the Centre's decision amounts to an "intrusion" to the rights of the states in the country's federal structure.
The Lok Sabha election will be held in 7 phases, beginning on April 11, 2019 and ending on May 19, 2019.
Fresh tremors were on Sunday felt in various parts of India, including the national capital Delhi, even as the death toll in Saturday's earthquake climbed to 62.
More than 25 years after the Babri Masjid was destroyed, another generation proclaims its commitment to building a Ram temple.
