Unpredictable polling in Tamil Nadu, and criminal cases stacked against Chief Minister Jayalalithaa will be two key factors to be taken into consideration when the government is formed at the Centre, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
The DMK has Stalin and Stalin alone as the key campaigner. The rest of them all, including half-sister Kanimozhi, are tied down to their own constituencies while those like party treasurer and former minister S Duraimurugan, to those of their children's constituencies.
Hollande will be arriving in Chandigarh on January 24 where he is expected to be received by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Barring Maharashtra, the poll percentage in rest of the states was in excess of 60 per cent while in Puducherry it was 80.47 per cent.
'Suicide rates among Indian farmers were a chilling 47 per cent higher than they were for the rest of the population in 2011. In some of the states worst hit by the agrarian crisis, they were well over 100 per cent higher. In Maharashtra, farmers were killing themselves at a rate that was 162 per cent higher than that for any other Indians excluding farmers. A farmer in this state is two-and-a-half times more likely to commit suicide than anyone else in the country, other than farmers,' says P Sainath.
AIADMK's Jayalalithaa won three assembly by-elections from her hospital bed. However, the DMK heir's decision to disempower second-line satraps, who were running personal fiefdoms in their districts, and his fresh approach, could prove beneficial in the next polls, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
The deadlock over finalising alliances has had a deleterious effect on the candidates of every party. The delay in alliance conclusion has also sent out confusing signals to the grass-roots who are unsure who will be their party candidate, or which party within an alliance will be allotted a particular constituency, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Inscrutable have been the ways of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa. She is a political strategist and tactician rolled into one that her unpredictable ways have won the day for her - mostly, says N Sathiya Moorthy
If the already demoralised Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam cadre, beaten worse by the shocking parliamentary poll debacle in May 2014 thought that the political set-back suffered by rival All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa Jayaram, in the light of a Bangalore court ordering a jail-term for her in September was a boon for their leadership, it's not to be.
According to the New York Times, Tamil Nadu has a 'rich and undiscovered history'.
It is possibly the first time that a regional party with not even enough numbers to move a no-trust motion has taken the lead, and others are following it. The hints of a no-trust move first came from the YSR Congress, and the ruling TDP could not have stayed on together when the question is another version of 'Telugu atma gouravam' - an issue that fired its founder N T Rama Rao in the 1980s, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Vijayakanth's DMDK may play a key role as Tamil Nadu's political parties scramble for allies to capture the state's 40 Lok Sabha seats.
Should the Karnataka high court deliver a verdict in the Jayalalithaa case on Thursday, the Supreme Court bench on Friday could pass orders in her bail extension plea that may end up staying the former ruling, reports N Sathiya Moorthy.
Does Pranab Mukherjee want to be 'PM' by office, not just by initials? The very prospect, with memories of the Narasimha Rao years scarred into their memories, scares the Nehru-Gandhis, says T V R Shenoy.
Now that Tamil Nadu's tallest politician is no more, it remains to be seen how new political re-alignments could shape up, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
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