Uttar Pradesh Governor BL Joshi is in New Delhi to consult the central leadership on Uttar Pradesh assembly's resolution to split the state into four parts.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has said she is not the only face of the party for Uttar Pradesh assembly polls and her remarks at a press conference on Friday about being the face of the party were made in a 'slight exaggerated way' in response to repeated queries from the media on the issue.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has announced financial assistance of Rs 2 lakh to the kin of each of the deceased and Rs 50,000 to the injured.
Governor Vishnukant Shastri accepted their resignation on the recommendation of Mayawati.
'Rani Bharti has been a delight to play. She starts off as someone whom we all know and relate to, but what she goes onto become is someone few of us can aspire to.'
In a jolt to former Chief Minister Mayawati, the Uttar Pradesh Lokayukta has said public money worth Rs 1,400 crore was siphoned off in construction of memorials during her regime and indicted 199 people including her close aide and former BSP minister Naseemuddi Siddiqui.
Notwithstanding Amitabh Bachchan abandoning claims on a farmland in Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh, the Uttar Pradesh government said it would pursue the forgery case against the Bollywood star.
When the BSP formed a government in Uttar Pradesh in 2007, it had bagged 206 seats and a vote share of 30.43 per cent.
Chief campaigner Rahul Gandhi's electioneering appeared to have helped the Congress only retain its existing strength in the House. It won 22 seats against the 25 it had in the previous assembly.
Mulayam Singh and Mayawati fell out after their ruling coalition in Uttar Pradesh crashed in 1995, two years after they came together along with smaller parties to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party out of power.
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.
Holi was celebrated with pomp and splendor across India on Friday, with people soaking in the festivities by smearing 'gulaal' on each other and exchanging greetings and sweets. Homes and streets wore a colourful look as the revellers splashed colours and feasted on traditional delicacies. Public transport did not ply in the morning in most major cities while metro services started functioning from noon. As Holi coincided with the second Friday prayers during the holy Islamic month of Ramzan, security -- including increased patrolling and picketing -- was beefed up in several states. In Delhi, more than 25,000 security personnel were deployed. Police closely monitored about 300 sensitive areas with CCTV cameras and drones.
Three of the fence-sitters rule fairly large states Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha that together send 63 members to Lok Sabha -- where the Congress or other opposition parties have been pushed to the margins.
The BJP is leaning on Yogi's 'batenge to katenge' theme to weave a unifying narrative that transcends caste and communal lines.
Kicking off her election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday attacked Chief Minister Mayawati for dismissing her ministers on election eve and asked whether this has cleansed her government.
Appealing to party workers to treat Bahujan Samaj Party's victory in Uttar Pradesh assembly elections as her birthday gift, Chief Minister and party supremo Mayawati on Sunday released a list of candidates for all 403 seats in the state.
The BSP supremo also ridiculed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for "not taking cognisance" of suicides by Dalit students when his party was in power.
In the same breath, the RPI-A leader said, "No one can challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- neither Congress president Rahul Gandhi, nor SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, nor BSP supremo Mayawati."
The Samajwadi Party's Mainpuri district unit Thursday gave a written request to the party chief to contest from the Karhal seat and he agreed, sources said.
Chief Minister Mayawati congratulated the farming community saying it was an achievement by 22.5 million farmers' families of the state.
Slamming Tarun Gogoi for the police firing in Guwahati on June 22 in which a 9-year-old boy was killed, social activist Swami Agnivesh on Thursday said that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should 'embarrass' the Assam chief minister by taking out a padayatra in Guwahati. "Just as Rahul Gandhi has undertaken a padayatra in Uttar Pradesh to embarrass (Chief Minister) Mayawati, the prime minister who represents Assam in Parliament should go on a padayatra here".
Gandhi had on Saturday said that the Congress reached out to the BSP leader, offering her the chief minister's post for contesting the assembly polls together, but she did not respond.
On May 2, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will step into Bihar and challenge the Nitish-Lalu order in the state.
Bhartiya Janata Party's all time favourite Ayodhya Ram Mandir issue has clearly taken a backseat in the party manifesto for the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. However, what appears to have taken Ayodhya's erstwhile prominent position were the multi-billion rupee monuments and parks erected by UP Chief Minister Mayawati.
Claiming shunted IAS officer Kunwar Fateh Bahadur has been appointed principal secretary to Chief Minister Mayawati, opposition parties in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday asked the Election Commission to remove him from the post immediately.
Reversing yet another decision taken during Mayawati regime, the Uttar Pradesh government on Tuesday decided to discontinue two schemes in the name of Dalit icon Bhimrao Ambedkar and launch a fresh one in the name of socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia.
Accusing opposition parties of anti-dalit mentality, ruling Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh today claimed that its president Mayawati's statues were installed as per the "written will" of party founder Kanshiram.
She also termed the trust vote won by Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav in the assembly on February 28 as "illegal and immoral." \n
Perhaps unwittingly, young Samajwadi chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has forgotten that it was the media campaign against Mayawati's undemocratic and despotic ways that helped him to romp home with a clear majority. Sharat Pradhan reports
"As the border is porous, criminals often commit crimes in India and slip into Nepal through the border. In a bid to provide fast and smooth movement to SSB personnel, the UP government has forwarded a Rs 1,503 crore project to the Centre for approval," UP Parliamentary Affairs Minister Lalji Verma said. The minister lamented that the Centre had reduced the state's financial assistance to modernise police force.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has showered praise on the multiple and extravagant monuments and parks built by his bete noire -- Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati.
Praising the Uttar Pradesh police for sternly handling the Samajwadi Party's anti-government street demonstrations across the state, Chief Minister Mayawati on Thursday issued a fresh warning to all opposition parties to refrain from indulging in such agitations. "Let the SP as well as other opposition parties be warned that they would be severely dealt with in case they choose to disrupt law and order in this state," Mayawati declared.
A day after the apex court ordered a CBI inquiry into alleged rape of a girl by Banda Bahujan Samaj Party MLA, Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday recommended handing over to the agency the sensational Lakhimpur case in which body of a 14-year-old girl was found hanging from a tree in a police station.
It dismissed a petition filed by the UP government challenging an Allahabad high court order staying investigations into cases against him.
Uttar Pradesh Cabinet Secretary Shashank Shekhar Singh on Monday refuted certain claims made by WikiLeaks with respect to his conversation with former United States Charge d'Affairs Peter Burleigh.
While Monday's Supreme Court order reinstating 18,000 dismissed Uttar Pradesh policemen came as a bolt from the blue for Chief Minister Mayawati, it has left her predecessor and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav all pepped up as the recruitments were made during his regime.
The Uttar Pradesh government, which had made budgetary allocation of crores of rupees for installation of statues of Chief Minister Mayawati and her mentor Kanshi Ram in the state, has said it is a wrong notion that only statues of dead persons can be installed.
The former chief minister said she would concentrate of development and law and order.
Rahul Gandhi was arrested on Wednesday night by the Uttar Pradesh police after he joined the land war here, pledging full support to farmers fighting against acquisition while lambasting Chief Minister Mayawati.
