After a spirited eight-hour debate in which 60 members participated, the Lok Sabha passed the Constitution (128th Amendment) Bill, with 454 members voting in favour and two against it.
The one-year-old Himachal Pradesh Cabinet headed by Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu was expanded on Tuesday with the induction of Rajesh Dharmani and Yadvinder Goma as cabinet ministers.
There are lessons for the Congress to learn from the Karnataka elections of how burying the hatchet among top leaders and not washing dirty linen in public can help, says Ramesh Menon.
Hitting out at the ruling Congress in Karnataka, he said the party failed to confer the Bharat Ratna on Ambedkar when it was in power.
In a statement after the apex court verdict, Thackeray said, "With folded hands, we request the prime minister and the president to take an immediate decision on Maratha quota."
Describing it as 'Sankalp Patra', the party in its manifesto promised 33 per cent reservation to women in government jobs and private institutions in the state and free rides in Haryana roadways buses.
Various Maratha organisations had held massive 'silent marches' across the state last year for various demands, including reservation.
While Modi had a party and an organisation that supported him, all Mulayam, a self-made man with no inheritance in politics, had was a set of (fairly flexible) beliefs.
Singh defeated Bharatiya Janata Party's Dara Singh Chauhan in the bypoll to the Ghosi Assembly constituency in Mau district with a margin of 42,759 votes on Friday.
Electioneering ended in Madhya Pradesh at 6 pm except in Naxalites-hit districts of Balaghat, Mandla and Dindori, where campaigning drew to a close early at 3 pm.
The Centre has appointed senior IAS officers Vumlunmang Vualnam and Neeraj Mittal as new secretaries in the ministry of civil aviation and the department of telecommunications respectively in a major secretary-level bureaucratic reshuffle, a government order stated.
A bench of Justices KM Joseph and BV Nagarathna said from the records tabled before the court it appears that the Karnataka government's decision is based on "absolutely fallacious assumption".
Following the party's sweep of assembly elections in three Hindi heartland states against the odds, the BJP's brain trust is now busy game-planning as to how it can improve on its 2019 Lok Sabha election tally of 303 seats.
The Congress, desperate to make a comeback in Gujarat, which has been ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party for over 20 years, has tried to reach out to various sections of society in its blueprint unveiled.
Rather than a blind reproduction of the government template, a more productive way of enforcing affirmative action in the private sector could be to emulate an American model, suggests Kanika Datta.
'The common belief in political circles is that if you provide reservation to somebody, s/he will automatically come up.' 'This is a very faulty understanding.'
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday attacked the Congress, saying it skipped the meeting convened to select the new Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) as he is a Dalit and this reflected the anti-Scheduled Castes mindset of the main opposition party.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday announced Prime Minister Narendra Modi will fight again from Varanasi in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections as it named 34 Union ministers in the first list of 195 candidates.
'We were supposed to be a united nation based on unity and diversity.' 'Now what we are doing is there will be a class called Marathas, Dangars, etc.' 'The 100 per cent of our nation's population will be in classes and you will be allocating the nation's education and service resources in terms of classes.' 'How does it work out in terms of equality? Where is your equal nation?'
The court held that the states were not required to 'collect quantifiable data' reflecting the backwardness among these communities.
The apex court, which had passed an order on May 10 and noted that no reservation for OBCs can be provisioned until the triple test formality is completed 'in all respects' by the state government, permitted the state to notify the reservation pattern local body wise as delineated in the reports of the dedicated commission.
"You cannot just pick Rs 8 lakh out of the thin air and fix it as a criteria. There has to be some basis, some study. Tell us whether any demographic study or data was taken into account in fixing the limit. How do you arrive at this exact figure? Can the Supreme Court strike down the criteria, if no study was undertaken?" the Supreme Court asked.
According to poll observers, there are about 3.88 lakh voters in Rampur assembly constituency and of them, about 2.27 lakh, about 60 per cent, are Muslims.
The government told the HC that 'Maratha community comprises people belonging to various castes and since the country doesn't conduct caste-based census anymore,' it was proving rather 'difficult' to get hold of the requisite data.
The National Judicial Commission Bill, 2022, was introduced after the majority of voice votes were in its favour.
Senior state leaders of the two parties pointed to propping up of the "new set of leaders not having much political stature" and lack of communication for the failure to reconcile differences.
The Supreme Court on Monday said it would hear on January 17 the matters in which it had directed the state election commissions of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh to re-notify the seats reserved for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the local bodies in these states under the general category.
Kejriwal asked whether the BJP-led central government was waiting for the Lok Sabha elections to make a move in this direction.
'Bihar's caste survey has bolstered the Opposition parties, but one shouldn't forget that the BJP is also trying to present itself as a party that cares for the OBCs more than other parties,' points out Sanjay Kumar.
The demand for a fresh caste census has stirred the political atmosphere in Bihar for some time.
'They think quick fixes like internship in the private sector will help. 'In fact, internships have been going on for the last one decade.' 'In 2014-2015 itself, we had a ministry of skill development. None of the programmes have yielded results, still they are continuing with such schemes under some other name.' 'We don't see any seriousness on the part of the government to attack the problem of unemployment.'
Mevani, after his meeting with the Gandhi scion, said he would ask his community members to defeat the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the Gujarat polls.
'She showed courage at every turn in her political career.'
If Modi wants to leave a real legacy, breaking India's strategic triangulation would be the real gift, notes Shekhar Gupta.
The ruling Congress is seeking to retain power in Chhattisgarh by banking on the welfare schemes of the Bhupesh Baghel government, while the Bharatiya Janata Party is hoping to corner it on the issues of alleged corruption, religious conversions and unfulfilled poll promises.
Congress leaders say that controversies like the one triggered by Janardhan Dwivedi could be damaging for the party in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha election.
All the essential services, schools and colleges have been excluded from the bandh.
Besides the national capital, polling for the sixth round of the marathon seven-phase elections 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.
He is now the first non-Congress chief minister to win a second term in office in the state, seen as a Congress bastion until just five years ago.
