Counting of votes for the high stakes assembly elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry began on Thursday morning with trends expected to be available by 11am.
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister and Nationalist Congress Party head Ajit Pawar on Monday said discussions were underway among the Mahayuti partners to finalise a formula for the new government formation in the state.
It will be the year of preparation for the electoral test in Uttar Pradesh, due in 2022. But before that, the West Bengal Assembly election will set the mood for the rest of 2021.
Nearly 4,800 elected MPs and MLAs will vote on Monday to elect the 15th President of India, with National Democratic Alliance candidate Droupadi Murmu having a clear edge over Opposition's Yashwant Sinha as over 60 per cent votes are expected to be cast in her favour.
The Chief Election Commissioner pointed out that the exercise involved nearly 7.3 crore voters and over 1.06 lakh polling stations.
Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, BJP chief J P Nadda and new party entrant Ashok Chavan and Union ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw and L Murugan were among the 41 candidates elected unopposed to Rajya Sabha on Tuesday while Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh will witness polling on February 27.
The byelections are of critical importance to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who lost the assembly poll to Bharatiya Janata Party's Suvendu Adhikari in Nandigram.
A senior TMC leader will be present at the proposed meeting, he said.
Pawan Chamling is all set to become CM for the fifth time in a row; SDF party led by him sweeps the assembly polls, winning 22 of the 32 seats. Anurag Kashyap reports.
'It's a classic conflict between the old and the new BJP. The new BJP is made up of turncoats and the old of veterans who slogged for decades when the BJP barely existed in West Bengal'
While the TMC was able to maintain its hold on the southern and coastal parts of the state, the BJP is doing well in the northern and western parts of the state, all predominantly tribal areas.
West Bengal minister Bachchu Hansda and Tehatta MLA Gouri Sankar Dutta joined the Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday after being denied nominations for the assembly polls by the Trinamool Congress.
In a four-cornered fight, the real battle is between Union minister Pratima Bhoumik and CPM's Kaushik Chanda.
Besides the national capital, polling 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. Simultaneously, polling will be held for 42 assembly constituencies in Odisha.
In yet another jolt for the Trinamool Congress dispensation, West Bengal forest minister Rajib Banerjee quit the Mamata Banerjee cabinet, joining the growing list of dissenters who have put the ruling camp in a tight spot ahead of the assembly elections.
As many as 51 MPs and MLAs have declared cases of crime against women.
The Congress on Friday suspended two of its legislators for voting for the Trinamool Congress in the Rajya Sabha biennial election for five seats in West Bengal.
'...or go to jail.' 'The government is getting them silenced.'
Electoral bonds have been pitched as an alternative to cash donations made to political parties as part of efforts to bring transparency in political funding.
In another display of the politics of threat in West Bengal, a ruling Trinamool Congress Member of Legislative Assembly openly threatened to "behead" a Congress leader in Birbhum district.
Stalin said one cannot and should not decide the mood of the entire country based on the results of one state elections.
Announcing the name of candidates for the West Bengal assembly polls, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday said she will be contesting from the Nandigram constituency as announced earlier.
Shah is scheduled to address a rally at Kolkata's Shaheed Minar Ground, where the state unit of the BJP will felicitate him for the passage of the CAA in Parliament, they said. Shah is also scheduled to inaugurate a new building of the NSG at Rajarhat and hold closed-door meetings with state BJP leadership along with Nadda.
West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee will not be attending the swearing-in ceremony of Congress leader Siddaramaiah as the Karnataka CM and has designated party leader Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar for the programme, a Trinamool Congress leader said.
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.
While the BJP and the Congress have always supported the bill, opposition by other parties and demands from some for quota for backward classes within the women's quota have been key sticking points.
However, a few defectors, who joined the BJP, got the better of their TMC rivals, including Suvendu Adhikari who emerged as a proverbial giant slayer, by defeating Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee albeit by a narrow margin.
BJP leaders in the state are either lying low or criticising the CAA move in hushed tones. Chandra Kumar Bose, vice-president of the BJP's state unit, is most vocal with his opposition to the Act in the current form. "The country is above petty party politics. How can I keep quiet when I see that something is happening which is wrong in its current form?" Other party leaders aren't as vocal as Bose but clandestinely have been questioning the merit of the CAA and its impact on the BJP's prospects in the state. In fact, at a time when the BJP started making deep inroads in the state, the fear of the CAA and the NRC appears to be ruining its prospects.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday said it will hear on December 6 the plea of a Congress leader challenging a recent notification by which the sale of electoral bonds has been extended by 15 more days in the year of general elections to legislative assemblies of states and Union territories (UTs) with a legislature.
Parliamentarians and legislators across the country voted on Monday to elect India's 15th president, choosing between opposition pick Yashwant Sinha and National Democratic Alliance nominee Droupadi Murmu who is favoured to win the battle to the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Chidambaram, who is the Congress' senior election observer for the assembly polls next year, asserted that the Trinamool Congress' entry into Goa "appears to be an imposition from the top that is based in West Bengal" and said he does not know the Mamata Banerjee-led party's motive in trying to start a unit in Goa by "encouraging defections" from other parties.
The top ten richest candidates are from the Trinamool Congress which has won a second consecutive term.
Kerala, Punjab and Rajasthan are the other three states to pass a resolution opposing the contentious legislation, reports Archis Mohan.
'For the first time one single party is getting 49% which is a record of its own.'
Nearly three months after joining the Trinamool Congress, former Goa legislator Lavoo Mamlatdar on Friday resigned from the party, accusing it of being communal and trying to create a divide between Hindus and Christians for votes ahead of the state Assembly polls.
The MGP, which had won three seats in the 2017 polls, is currently left with only one MLA after two of its legislators joined the ruling BJP.
The Trinamool Congress on Monday lost five more sitting MLAs and the control of the Malda Zilla Parishad to the Bharatiya Janata Party as defections continued to rock West Bengal's ruling party ahead of the assembly polls.
Looking at the history of women representation in Lok Sabha, the percentage remained about 5 till the 1970s and it was only in 2009 that it could reach a double-digit figure.
The Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday named Union minister Narendra Singh Tomar and its general secretary Arun Singh as central observers for the election of the leader of its legislative party in Assam.
EC said it has decided to 'withdraw' the press note announcing the elections to RS seats from Goa, Gujarat and West Bengal.
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