Noting that the young girl belonged to a Dalit migrant family from Bihar, Finance Minister and senior BJP leader Nirmala Sitharaman also took a swipe at Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav, questioning if he had asked Rahul Gandhi about the issue while holding a joint poll campaign with him in the state.
The Bharatiya Janata Party minister was merely voicing what we already know -- that most Indians are an inherently racist people, says Indulekha Aravind
He also said the whole world knew that the BJP alone knows how to run the nation.
Rahul Gandhi is neither Congress president, office-bearer nor Congress leader in Parliament. This technical leeway provides adequate cover for Shiv Sena-Congress ties taking a nosedive, says Rasheed Kidwai.
The Congress vice president said the Indian Army works for the country and there was no need for any political leader to make comments against the army chief.
"The fact is that after 106 days of pre-trial incarceration there is not a single charge framed against me as I speak now," said Chidambaram, who is expected to attend the Rajya Sabha proceedings on Thursday.
Come Saturday and there may be a battle on the streets of Hyderabad between the people of Rayalseema and Telangana.
This will be after over two decades that the 'black cat' commandos of the elite counter-terror force will be taken out from VIP protection duties, a task not originally charted for it when the force was conceptualised and raised in 1984.
The second list has named 16 candidates from Uttar Pradesh and five from Maharashtra.
President Pranab Mukherjee talked though on the ordinance to protect convicted lawmakers as he questioned three Union ministers -- Law Minister Kapil Sibal, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal Nath and Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde. He sought minutes of the Cabinet and all party meetings after which the United Progressive Alliance withdrew the decree.
Nath said the silver bricks were bought from contributions made by members of the Congress. "We will send 11 silver bricks for the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya on the behalf of citizens of Madhya Pradesh," the former chief minister told reporters.
Congress spokesperson Gourav Vallabh said Singh was 'not fully committed' towards the party's ideology and that is why he left this fight midway to join the saffron party.
The Congress and other opposition parties have accused the police of bias and inaction in the Delhi violence.
About 20 Punjab Congress leaders met in Ludhiana on Tuesday, with some of them batting for a key role for Navjot Singh Sidhu, the former state party unit chief who was among the participants.
51 constituencies across 7 states go to the polls in the fifth phase of the Lok Sabha election.
According to the sources, former Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar, ex-Union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, CPI national secretary D Raja, Bharip Bahujan Mahasangh leader and grandson of Dr BR Ambedkar, Prakash, and retired diplomat Gopal Krishna Gandhi are some of the probable contenders whose names the Opposition parties are considering.
Pawar also announced a panel of senior party leaders to draw a future course of action. Party workers and leaders, however, demanded that Pawar withdraw his decision.
Police resorted to baton charges and fired tear gas shells to disperse the protesters.
Ranaut, who had said she feared Mumbai Police after the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput and likened the Maharashtra capital to Pakistan occupied Kashmir, thanked Union Home Minister Amit Shah and declared that no one could crush a patriot.
The DMK leadership may now have to deal with a demand for more seats from its Congress ally in the Lok Sabha polls, predicts N Sathiya Moorthy.
She recited a Kashmiri verse, which was part of a poem by Sahitya Akademi award winner Pandit Dinanath Koul. She rendered the verse in both Kashmiri and Hindi. Besides, the minister quoted woman Tamil poet Avvaiyar, Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar, a verse from Raghuvamsa by Kalidasa, as well as late finance minister Arun Jaitley while talking about the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
The stage is set for the first of the five-phased assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir as 12 sitting MLAs, including seven ministers, are among 123 candidates trying their luck in 15 constituencies that will go to polls on Tuesday in all three regions of the state.
The BJP is focusing on 160 seats 'we have never won, seats where we have reasonable support, and those we lost narrowly.'
Voting came to an end for the Karnataka assembly elections on Wednesday at 6 pm with data showing a voter turnout of 65.69 per cent an hour ago.
The Union Cabinet rejected the ordinance route for a set of anti-corruption measures despite pressure from Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi for bringing such laws.
Shah said that the BJP hoped the Dalit nominee would be unanimously selected as the President.
AIADMK insiders see the very idea of an NDA conclave as a measure of the BJP's current electoral assessment, stemming from relative weakness in 2024 compared to 2014 and 2019. In their reckoning, the BJP now needs allies more than the other way round, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
The Congress won 40 seats in the 68-member Himachal Pradesh assembly while the BJP got 25 seats.
Senior leaders Mallikarjun Kharge and Shashi Tharoor, in the race for the post of Congress president, not only possess contrasting demeanour but have had an equally disparate political journey.
The former Union minister had suffered a stroke in 2008 and was hospitalised since then.
In a series of tweets, Shah also questioned Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi whether they support the People's Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD), a conglomerate of regional and national political parties in Jammu and Kashmir formed to demand the restoration of the Article 370, scrapped last year.
Even as Sonia Gandhi was on Saturday re-elected chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party and asked party men not to bicker in public amid a fierce blame game in the party, the anger and anguish was visible after the meet was over. Anita katyal reports
As the National Investigation Agency started its probe into the serial blasts in this temple town, Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde on Wednesday did not rule out the involvement of three to four persons in the attack.
Patel, 71, the quintessential backroom strategist for the Congress, died at a Gurugram hospital in the early hours of Wednesday due to multiple organ failure more than a month after he tested positive for COVID-19.
With a decision on the Telangana issue imminent, Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said the situation in Andhra Pradesh is peaceful.
After having gone out on a limb over the creation of Telangana, the UPA government is expected to go for the kill and do whatever it takes to pass the bill in Lok Sabha. But the question remains whether the Congress would really be able to push the bill in the noise and confusion. Renu Mittal reports.
'There is a need for the Congress to introspect.' 'Introspection means to find out where we have gone wrong in the last eight-ten years, how we have gone wrong, where we have failed to succeed.'
He made the attack on Jung while joining a protest by BJP MP Maheish Girri, who demanded an apology from CM Kejriwal for linking him to the murder of an NDMC official.
President Pranab Mukherjee has given his nod to the Telangana Bill, which is likely to be tabled in Parliament on Tuesday.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday appealed to the people of Manipur to maintain peace and promised that justice will be ensured to all sections of the society.
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