Tamil Nadu government on Tuesday announced Amma baby care kits to newborns across the state to extend caring hands to mothers delivering babies in state-run hospitals.
Stalin has given due respect to seniority in the pecking order, but has also taken into consideration the demands of individual ministries and the suitability of individuals, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
'Human trafficking from Bangladesh is a regular phenomenon and those people come here to work or in search of greener pastures. They are all over the country. We are giving them legal recognition and making them citizens so that they don't have to live in fear,' says R Nataraj, AIADMK MLA from Tamil Nadu.
Awaiting the outcome of a meeting convened by the Centre, Karnataka Cabinet on Wednesday decided to defer till Thursday a decision on release of 6,000 cusecs of Cauvery water per day to Tamil Nadu as per the Supreme Court direction.
Emerging from a "consultative" meeting chaired by Chief Minister E K Palaniswami, Finance Minister D Jayakumar declared that the "unanimous" decision was taken in tune with the aspirations of the party cadres and people.
Good intentions and elaborate roadmaps apart, there is an urgent need for the Tamil Nadu chief minister to come up with branded schemes like MGR's meal scheme, asserts N Sathiya Moorthy.
Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana have announced a lockdown of educational institutions, malls and other places that attract people in large numbers, even as some of them have been reporting increase in positive cases.
There is a sudden realisation in party circles that prolonged court cases could damage its standing, both among the cadres and voters, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
It is increasingly clear that for the BJP to try and establish itself as an electoral force in Tamil Nadu, the party has to come out of the old Brahminical mould, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
She faced intense and protracted struggle to eventually head the AIADMK.
The chief minister still has time to repair the damage but he will have to act all-round, both at the government and party levels, suggests N Sathiya Moorthy.
The land price collected for the said land allotment will be refunded.
The Madras High Court on Wednesday directed its registry to post a PIL seeking regulation of various clubs and questioning the dress code imposed by them in the backdrop of denial of entry to a dhoti-clad Judge by TNCA Club in Chennai to some other bench.
The BJP calculates that simultaneous polls to Parliament and TN assembly could help it, intent as it is on making the state break from its Dravidian past, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Without strategising together, Jayalalithaa's successor, Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, and M Karunanidhi's son-cum-successor, M K Stalin, have used tough-talking on seat-sharing with allies, to replace charisma that they purportedly lacked, during the run-up to the assembly polls scheduled for April 6, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Monday was the fourth consecutive day, proceedings were washed out over the Rafale jet deal and Cauvery issues.
What does Udhayanidhi's induction as minister mean? For the DMK, it indicates the future course, direction and leadership. It is continuity with change, and change with continuity, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
Karunanidhi was convinced that using the 2G cases against the DMK and reopening the fodder case against Lalu Prasad Yadav were products of the Congress leadership's short-sightedness. A revealing excerpt from A S Panneerselvan's Karunanidhi: A Life.
All 41 candidates from Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Telangana were elected unopposed on Friday after the biennial elections to 57 Rajya Sabha seats were announced recently.
The AIADMK's staying power is not in question, but it has to regain the winning streak. That will require its leaders and leadership to re-wire themselves, to be able to re-think situations in ways different from what they had been accustomed to, suggests Sathiya Moorthy.
Stalin, like his father M Karunanidhi did in 2004, may play the king-maker in a way -- not the king, unless the 2024 post-poll circumstances throws up a situation where he alone becomes acceptable to the rest, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Dinakaran met Sasikala for the first time after her loyalist E K Palaniswami won the vote of confidence in the Tamil Nadu Assembly on February 18.
The meeting also decided to strengthen the security measures to monitor the local fishing boats and crews, intensify checking of passenger boats and vessels reaching the islands and strengthen the ship berthing points and helibase by installing CCTV cameras.
While the Constitution makes everyone in India eligible to work anywhere in the country, states have used legal loopholes to frame laws.
The going is not going to be easy for the DMK and its allies in Elections 2024. Despite the seats sweepstake in the 2021 assembly polls, the vote-share difference of 5.6% (DMK's 45.38% versus AIADMK-BJP's 39.72%) is not insurmountable on a bad day, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
This comes after the Legislature Party meeting had passed a resolution calling for actions against those who spoke to Sasikala, close-aide of late chief minister J Jayalalithaa.
Several Members of Parliament and Members of Legislative Assembly have declared cases in which they have been charged with inciting communal tension. The Association for Democratic Reforms in a report gives details of elected representatives with such charges.
In switching over, Nitish has sent out a message that if he could not now become the NDA's PM, then he would need to stay on as CM at the very least, which a third term for Modi would not let him have, N Sathiya Moorthy points out.
Under the provision of Section 92 of the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution, governor's rule is imposed for six months.
While in the AIADMK office you could feel the vibes of victory, at OPS' house you could feel the struggle.
While critics and protestors have multifarious arguments to offer, the defence of CAA has been uni-dimensional and uni-focussed as has been the case with most policies of the Modi government and the political positions of his party. But to be drawn into an issue that has assumed more than local and national dimensions, Rajini has knowingly or otherwise, taken the plunge and in favour of the BJP -- or, so it has come to be seen, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
O Panneerselvam is the first chai-wallah to become chief minister in the country. Gujarat's Narendra Modi, the better-known chai-wallah to become chief minister, followed Paneerselvam around a fortnight later in 2001. The parallel should end there, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Second-line AIADMK leaders and cadres alike say that by starting the talks first with the BJP and committing the party to an alliance without discussing seat-sharing, the leadership might have commenced the coalition discourse at the wrong end. According to them, even 20 seats for the BJP may be too many, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
On its own or with allies the Congress has a strong presence in states that account for a total of 253 LS seats, or 20 short of the magic figure of 272 required to form a government at the Centre. So what is Mamata Banerjee talking about, asks N Sathiya Moorthy.
Today, as Jayalalithaa's friend, advisor and 'sister' Sasikala is also lodged in Bangalore Central jail, the former Tamil Nadu chief minister is where she was before: alone, all alone
By changing the nation's name from India to Bharat, would this landmass overnight lose the emotional and cultural linkage that had been built over generations, centuries and millennia, asks N Sathiya Moorthy.
The DMK combine has won 37 of the 38 LS constituencies in Tamil Nadu, and bagged 13 of the 22 assembly bypolls. What swept away the AIADMK-BJP alliance in the southern state was not dravidian ideology but job loss and graft bias, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
In the absence of the over-arching 'Jaya charisma', EPS has to convince the AIADMK's traditional constituencies, including those in his western districts, that his leadership would stand up against the BJP-led Centre even in a post-poll scenario, a la Jayalalithaa, and would not yield as much as party founder MGR had done, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
The Congress said it will continue their march once the COVID third wave declines and the curbs are relaxed.