'The honourable prime minister virtually handpicked me for the Amritsar East seat.' 'Amit Shahji announced that if I am elected, the whole of Punjab will be drugs free.'
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday flew into Colombo in the early hours for a historic visit during which he is expected to hold talks with the country's top leadership.
The new chief minister, if from the Congress, will have little or no time for political administration, to ensure that he does not lose the voter's goodwill even before the Lok Sabha polls. He can count only on one thing. That the BJP may not want to upset him too early lest an early failure should become an added problem for the party in all the polls to follow, predicts N Sathiya Moorthy.
Sri Lanka's newly elected president Mithripala Sirisena waves at media as he leaves the election commission in Colombo. Photograph: Dinuka Liyanawatte/ Reuters
Senior Janata Dal-United leader Dhananjay Singh pitched for Opposition unity ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and said party workers in Uttar Pradesh want Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to contest the elections from the state's Phulpur constituency.
Even if the BJP gets 60, 70, or even 100 per cent of the votes in the seats where it scored more than 50 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, these will still add up to only 224 seats, argues Shekhar Gupta.
According to BJP insiders, every Union minister has been given 3-4 seats to mentor and has been told to work hard on these constituencies in the next 20 months to ensure the party's victory.
However, speculation remained rife that the meeting was part of Banerjee's plan to form an opposition front with regional players minus the Congress.
Rajapaksa was appointed as the premier on October 26 by President Maithripala Sirisena after sacking Ranil Wickremesinghe, plunging the nation into a constitutional crisis.
Amid a controversy over the recent the JNU row, the BJP said freedom of expression does not give a right to call for the country's destruction.
In his first poll rally for the April 6 assembly polls, Modi rooted for the Tamil language, culture and invoked the welfare legacies of M G Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa, late chief ministers and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam icons.
'After the Congress's 2014 Lok Sabha debacle, commentators identified three major shortcomings: Leadership, organisation, and ideology.' 'Here we are six years later -- and what are the Congress's major failings? Leadership, organisation, and ideology.' 'The party seems to have learned very little during its six years in the Opposition wilderness.'
The announcement was made by AIADMK coordinator and deputy chief minister O Panneerselvam and Union Minister and senior BJP leader Piyush Goyal, party election in-charge for Tamil Nadu, who described it as a "mega alliance".
The grand old party faces the onerous task of rebuilding its moribund organisation, which is struggling to overcome a leadership crisis and regain credibility with the voters.
The inauguration new parliament building will take place in two phases.
Former chief minister of Puducherry V Narayanasamy on Wednesday cautioned the voters against supporting the alliance comprising the Bharatiya Janata Party, AINRC and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in the coming assembly polls as these parties would have no qualms to merge the Union territory with Tamil Nadu.
The Bharatiya Janata Party rejected this was any sort of demonetisation and instead reminded the Congress that even during the rule of Manmohan Singh, old currency notes were taken off circulation.
'In the last three to four months the BJP vote share in Tamil Nadu, which was 2.86% in 2016, has gone up to about 5%-6%.' 'The AIADMK will lose the minority votes and others who don't like the BJP and Modi.' 'The AIADMK decided to take the risk to get the 5%-6% votes that the BJP will bring in.'
ndependent of the political fallout, which Stalin has sought to arrest through the withdrawal of the measures as fast as they were introduced, there are concerns about the way those decisions came to be taken, without adequate application of mind, not in official terms but in political and electoral contexts, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
If Tamil Nadu BJP President K Annamalai bought it in 2015, did he get prior approval from the Union home ministry, and did he include it in his annual wealth returns, sections of the media want to know. N Sathiya Moorthy on the curious case of the 'Rafale' watch.
Lashing out at both the opposition and ruling fronts led by the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Thursday said that neither dukandar nor chowkidar opens their mouths when Muslims are oppressed.
As opposition leaders like the Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Janata Dal-United supremo and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar expressed solidarity with Kejriwal on Saturday and renewed calls to speed up opposition unity efforts to take on the BJP, officials said the CBI may ask the AAP chief about the policy formulation process, especially of the "untraceable" file which was earlier slated to be put before the Delhi Council of Ministers.
Twenty people were gunned down in Andhra Pradesh's Chittoor district in a police operation said to be against red sanders smugglers that came under severe attack from the government and political parties in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, which claimed 12 victims were labourers from their state.
Delhi finds itself between the rock and hard place in the coming Sri Lankan election, points out Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
'Your strike rate is very important when it comes to seat-sharing.'
Accompanied by BJP national general secretary and party in-charge of poll-bound Tamil Nadu, C T Ravi, and Murugan, with his security detail in tow, the home minister warmly waved at the overjoyed supporters who had thronged the airport since the morning.
"Congratulations to Mamata Didi for @AITCofficial's win in West Bengal. The Centre will continue to extend all possible support to the West Bengal Government to fulfil people's aspirations and also to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic," he tweeted.
'We may be weak now, but the importance of the Congress cannot be denied.'
Many has termed the state government's move of considering 'third gender' a separate caste in the ongoing exercise as a 'criminal act'
41 years ago, Dalits in Meenakshipuram converted to Islam, sending shockwaves through the nation.' A Ganesh Nadar/Rediff.com returns to the village to discover that past antagonisms lurk below the surface.
Sunil Gatade and Venkatesh Kesari reveal that Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar's name is now doing the rounds as President Kovind's likely successor.
Opposition leaders on Saturday lauded the Congress for its victory in Karnataka and thanked the people of the state, saying that this win has showed that 'Modi is not invincible'.
Denying rumours that he may opt out of the presidential race due to meagre support, Tharoor said he was very much in the fray and has been receiving support from various quarters.
Mamata Banerjee fended off a spirited challenge by a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party in West Bengal with a landslide victory for her Trinamool Congress on Sunday for a third consecutive term and the saffron party and the Left Democratic Front were poised to form government again in Assam and Kerala respectively while the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam stormed back to power in Tamil Nadu after a gap of 10 years.
For the first 90 days of 2021, from January 5 onwards, one Union minister will visit one district in Tamil Nadu every week till the assembly election.
''He had given tools to fight all forms of homogenisation.'
From the point of view of qualification, Murmu is probably educationally the least qualified among India's recent Presidents. But then, with the BJP in command, she will be required to do little but sign on the dotted line.
Dealing with the Sirisena government in Sri Lanka, says G Ganapathy Subramaniam, is a lot easier for India than engaging with the Rajapaksa regime.
A sizeable number of MLAs from across state assemblies cross-voted in support of President-elect Droupadi Murmu, defying their parties' stated support to Opposition candidate Yashwant Sinha, sources said on Thursday.
