Former Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha who joined Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Saturday said his tipping point to join the party was when West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee got attacked in Nandigram.
Once a reviled practice in the state, both the parties seem to have endorsed a record number of turncoats this time -- triggering a wave of discontentment among their loyalists.
The meeting ended at 2055 hours, after 45 minutes of drama over Banerjee sulking that she was not being consulted when important bills and amendments were being brought before the Cabinet. At this point, one minister said she should not spend so much time in Kolkata, which made her angrier.
The raid by the ED, which is probing the money trail of the school jobs scam, was conducted late Thursday evening, an official of the agency said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday held deliberations with Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president J P Nadda amid speculation about a reshuffle in the Union cabinet, an exercise Modi has not undertaken since forming the government for a second time in May 2019.
Three TMC leaders Amit Mitra, Bratya Basu and Rathin Ghosh were sworn-in virtually. Mitra is unwell and both Basu and Ghosh are recuperating from COVID-19.
Sources said the reshuffle will also aim at an image makeover for the party hit by school jobs scam probe.
Not only the BJP but key bureaucrats are also known to have hinted to the top leadership of the need to expand the Cabinet.
The Union Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, also observed silence for two minutes in the memory of Mukherjee.
After a Cabinet meeting held at the state secretariat, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee told reporters that the previous Left Front government had raised the limit by five years from 32 years to 37 years.
As many as 37 ministers have been dropped from the government in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's third term and these include seven with cabinet rank -- prominent among them being Smriti Irani, Anurag Thakur and Narayan Rane.
Bandyopadhyay, a 1987-batch IAS officer of West Bengal cadre, was scheduled to retire on May 31 after completion of 60 years of age. However, he was granted a three-month extension following a nod from the Centre.
According to a schedule of her five-day visit provided by her Trinamool Congress, Banerjee is slated to meet Modi at 4 pm on Tuesday.
Share of central government will be Rs. 5,100 crore and of the state governments of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal will be Rs. 1,900 crore.
As BJP leaders went all out to project the event as a moment of national pride, some leaders were directly critical of the ceremony with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, belonging to the Communist Party of India-Marxist, slamming the state's role in the Ram Temple consecration, saying the line that demarcates religion and state seems to be 'getting thinner and thinner'.
Senior Trinamool Congress leader Subrata Mukherjee died while being treated for cardiac ailments at a state-run hospital in Kolkata on Thursday, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said.
Hours after quitting as the MLA of the West Bengal Assembly, Rajib Banerjee on Friday resigned from the primary membership of the Trinamool Congress, intensifying speculation that he might soon switch over to the Bharatiya Janata Party.
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.
'West Bengal is an industry-friendly state.'
There are two such seats in Tamil Nadu and one each in West Bengal, Assam, Maharashtra, Puducherry and Madhya Pradesh.
The Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi met on Tuesday morning to clear the Bill that is likely to come up in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday
Iin the aftermath of the brutal gang rape of a 23-year old girl in New Delhi who later died in a Singapore hospital, the West Bengal government on Wednesday decided to set up 88 fast-track courts to hear crimes against women. A decision to this effect was taken at a cabinet meeting presided over by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Tamil Nadu, Telangana and West Bengal reported their first COVID-19 variant Omicron cases on Wednesday, four more persons each tested positive in Maharashtra and Kerala.
Trinamool Congress vice-president Yashwant Sinha on Sunday demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah following the outcome of West Bengal assembly poll.pti
Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, an influential Congress leader from West Bengal's Murshidabad district and known to be close to President Pranab Mukherjee, is a three-time Lok Sabha MP.
Wednesday's expansion shows that Modi still has a keen eye on Bengal. The BJP is gearing up for the panchayat elections in Bengal next May and the Lok Sabha elections in 2024.
Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Sarbananda Sonowal, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Narayan Rane, all of whom are being seen as probables for induction as ministers in the Modi government, arrived in the national capital on Tuesday amid indications that the Union Council of Ministers is likely to be expanded on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday slammed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for seeking en bloc voting by Muslims for the Trinamool Congress and said had his party made a similar appeal to Hindus, it would have been criticised and censured.
Those joining Prime Minister Narendra Modi's council of ministers for the first time include three former chief ministers -- Shivraj Singh Chouhan (Madhya Pradesh), Manohar Lal Khattar (Haryana) and H D Kumaraswamy (Karnataka).
Adhikari, a former minister in the cabinet of chief minister Mamata Banerjee, had resigned from the primary membership of the TMC on Thursday.
West Bengal's industry minister Partha Chatterjee, arrested in the SSC scam, should be removed immediately from his post and expelled from the Trinamool Congress, the party's state general secretary Kunal Ghosh demanded on Thursday.
Though different voices are emerging from within the ruling BJP in Madhya Pradesh over the issue, several saffron party MLAs, including senior leaders, appeared worried about a possible repeat of the 'Gujarat formula' to overcome anti-incumbency in the central state, where Assembly elections are due in end-2023.
He hinted the decision was partly due to losing the ministerial berth and also differences with the state BJP leadership.
The cyclone, according to an IMD report early Sunday, is developing into a severe cyclonic storm over the Bay of Bengal and can potentially become a very severe cyclonic storm in the next 24 hours, S N Pradhan, the chief of NDRF said in New Delhi.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, however, was conspicuous by her absence at the event, which was attended by tens of thousands of people as the Congress sought to promote opposition unity.
The two-member commission will be headed by former Calcutta high court Chief Justice Jyotirmay Bhattacharya. Former Supreme Court judge Madan Bhimrao Lokur is its other member.
Manoj Tiwary played 12 ODIs and three T20Is for India between 2008 to 2015, but had a nearly two-decade long career for Bengal during which he featured in 141 first class games,.
Former Trinamool Congress MP Dinesh Trivedi joined the Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday, weeks after he announced quitting his Rajya Sabha membership on the floor of the House deploring 'violence' in poll-bound West Bengal.
Over 1.54 crore voters in the eastern states of West Bengal and Assam will exercise their franchise in the 1st phase of polling
The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) has directed its rescue teams to ensure that the country's major medical oxygen generation plants based in Odisha and West Bengal are 'running and alive' during Cyclone Yaas that is developing in the Bay of Bengal, a senior officer said.
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