At its Jaipur meeting, the BJP will focus on this year's assembly elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh while the Congress's Chintan Shivir in Udaipur will discuss how it can resurrect itself.
The Congress on Thursday renamed the Rahul Gandhi-led Manipur-Mumbai yatra starting on January 14 as the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, which will travel through 100 Lok Sabha segments in 15 states including Arunachal Pradesh, and asserted it will prove to be as 'transformative' as his earlier cross-country march.
The party's top leadership, which is now looking for a replacement for Gandhi, will have a new team once the new Congress chief is appointed and some more resignations are likely to pour in till then.
Amid escalating tensions with Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, the Congress on Saturday said it was open to the idea of a United Progressive Alliance coordination committee to bring greater cohesion within the alliance. At the same time, it dismissed suggestions that the Congress was scared of Trinamool entering the poll fray in Uttar Pradesh or any other state.
Consolidating its position, the Bharatiya Janata Party wrested high-profile Rampur and Azamgarh Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh from the Samajwadi Party and won three assembly seats, including that of Chief Minister Manik Saha, in Tripura in by-election results announced on Sunday.
He also said the governments of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BSP and the SP that have ruled Uttar Pradesh in the last 32 years, when Congress was not in power, failed to live up to the expectations of the people and the Congress was set for a comeback in the state.
"I sometimes think of leaving it, but the chief minister's post doesn't leave me," Ashok Gehlot famously said earlier this year, in part as a signal to the Congress top brass not to pick someone else for the job if the party wins the assembly polls.
The BJP believes that the only party still capable of leading a credible challenge against it is the Congress. Please note how BJP campaigners in states where the Congress may count for a cipher or thereabouts, mostly attack the Congress, observes Shekhar Gupta.
As Mallikarjun Kharge won the Congress president poll, his electoral rival Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday said the 'democratic contest' has galvanised vibrancy at all levels and has prompted a healthy and constructive discussion on change, which will serve the party in good stead in the future.
In a letter to Kharge, Khan said he will not campaign for party candidates for the remaining phases of the Lok Sabha polls and is also resigning from the state Congress campaign committee.
The Congress on Wednesday filed a police complaint over the recent statements of leaders belonging to the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) targeting Rahul Gandhi.
The Congress party's first list of 194 Lok Sabha candidates released on Saturday night has no major surprises. Anita Katyal reports
The controversy has sparked reactions across states. The famous Mankameshwar temple in Uttar Pradesh has now banned offerings of 'prasad' bought by devotees from outside and said they can offer homemade 'prasad' or fruits.
Priyanka also lauded her mother, calling her the bravest woman for overcoming huge difficulties during her record 19-year tenure as the Congress chief.
The G-23 group seems to have expanded with several senior Congressmen attending Wednesday's meeting.
Among the other promises made by the party are purchase of wheat and paddy at Rs 2,500 per quintal and Rs 400 per quintal for sugarcane.
In an apparent message to the G23, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi on Saturday said she is a full-time, hands-on party president and there is no need for leaders to speak to her through the media.
Fadnavis further said it was too early to comment on a foreign or Bangladeshi link to the riots as the probe is underway.
While Kharge is considered the firm favourite with his perceived proximity to the Gandhis and a large number of senior leaders backing him, Tharoor has pitched himself as the candidate of change.
Pradhan has stated that the message in question was not sent by him, and he wasn't given an opportunity to explain himself.
The Congress cannot do without the Gandhi-Nehru family, and they ensure the unity of the party. The Congress experimented with a Narasimha Rao and went back to the family. Sonia Gandhi neither faces a threat to her leadership nor a prospect of a split, which her mother-in-law had to contend with. But she will have to show a resoluteness she displayed in early 2004 if the party is to revitalise
From the 'group of 23' leaders, who had written letter to Gandhi seeking Congress' overhaul, Azad and Sharma continue to be regular members of the CWC,
Visiting Uttar Pradesh for the first time after Congress' debacle in the recent Assembly polls, Rahul Gandhi was on Monday flooded with complaints that groupism, poor candidate selection and neglect of grassroot level workers were mainly responsible.
Facing opposition fire for exit polls allegedly being used for stock market manipulation, Axis My India's chief Pradeep Gupta has said he is open to facing all kinds of investigations and it would help do business in a much better way if the government frames specific regulations for pollsters.
Called "Babuji", the former chief minister of undivided Madhya Pradesh and former Governor of Uttar Pradesh in the post-Babri Masjid demolition era was considered as a people's man and was accessible to all.
Party's state unit chiefs of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat were also detained along with the workers during the protests.
A local court in Ajmer has issued notices to the dargah committee, the Ministry of Minority Affairs, and the Archaeological Survey of India on a plea seeking to declare the shrine of Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti a temple. The petition, filed in September, has sparked a heated debate, with politicians and community leaders weighing in on the potentially volatile issue. The dargah committee has declined to comment, but the Anjuman Syed Zadgan, a body representing the caretakers of the dargah, described the petition as a deliberate attempt to fracture society along communal lines. The petition comes just days after four people were killed in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh, following a local court ordering survey of a Mughal-era shrine. The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, which fixed August 15, 1947, as the cut-off date for status quo on the character of religious places, is at the centre of much of the debate. Several politicians, including Union minister Giriraj Singh and PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti, have weighed in on the issue. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has called the civil court's decision to entertain the petition unwarranted and has asked the Supreme Court to immediately intervene.
Vora was admitted to the Escorts Hospital in Okhla a few days ago with a urinary infection. He also had a lung infection and was put on ventilator support, his family said.
About 20 Punjab Congress leaders met in Ludhiana on Tuesday, with some of them batting for a key role for Navjot Singh Sidhu, the former state party unit chief who was among the participants.
Ghulam Nabi Azad's resignation from the Congress on Friday marked the most high-profile exit of one of the "Group of 23" (G-23) leaders, who had written to party chief Sonia Gandhi two years ago for a "collective and inclusive leadership" in the organisation, exposing the faultlines in the grand old party.
Controversial Punjabi singer Sidhu Mussewala, who joined the Congress sometime ago will contest from Mansa and actor Sonu Sood's sister Malvika Sood from Moga.
Faced with one of the worst showing in the Lok Sabha polls, Bahujan Samaj Party supremo and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati on Tuesday dissolved all the committees of the party.
Police have launched a probe into the killing of former Maharashtra minister Baba Siddique from different angles, including a possible contract killing, business rivalry or threat over a slum rehabilitation project, officials said on Sunday.
The ruling Bahujan Samaj Party has strongly refuted All India Congress Committee general secretary Digvijay Singh's sweeping allegations about massacre of farmers by the Uttar Pradesh police in Greater Noida's BhattaParsaul village, where a violent clash had ensued between cops and protesting local farmers earlier this month.
A week after her return from the United States after surgery, Sonia Gandhi will be back to active party work by presiding over a meeting of the Congress's Central Election Committee. Party general secretary Janardhan Dwivedi said that Gandhi will be participating in Thursday's CEC meeting to finalise tickets for the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections scheduled early next year. This will be the Congress president's first public appearance after she returned to Delhi from the US.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Wednesdau held a meeting of party general secretaries and office bearers to discuss the outcome of the Assembly elections in the five states, including Uttar Pradesh, and the reasons behind it.
The Union government has ordered the complete withdrawal of the counter-terrorist commando force NSG from VIP security duties and handing over its nine "high-risk" VIPs to the CRPF by next month, official sources said Wednesday.
'It is an existential crisis. We cannot recover lost ground through social media. We need to forge alliances and reshape our ideological contours.'
Nilanshu Chaturvedi polled 66,810 votes, while Bharatiya Janata Party rival Shankar Dayal Tripathi got 52,677 votes.
With the election campaign in Karnataka witnessing a bitter war of words between the BJP and the Congress, both the parties rushed to the Election Commission, seeking ban on electioneering by top leaders of the other side.
