A bench headed by Chief Justice N V Ramana agreed to hear next week the EC's plea after senior advocate Vikas Singh submitted a large number of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail machines (VVPATs) are still being preserved and need to be released.
The Delhi high court on Thursday sought response of the Centre and the Election Commission on a plea seeking to ensure that masks are worn mandatorily by everyone involved in poll campaigns during the ongoing elections in various states and union territories.
The results of bypolls to three Lok Sabha and 29 assembly seats spread across 13 states and a union territory have been a mixed bag for the BJP as its fortunes continue to nosedive in West Bengal against the might of Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee while bad tidings have also come from states like Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The CPI-M leader was the chief minister of the state from 2000 to 2011.
In the Interim Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that a high power committee would be set up to consider the challenges arising from 'fast population grown and demographic changes.' 'But who wants data? It pays to feed people's fears, insecurities and apprehensions. If such fears don't exist, they must be created,' her husband Parakala Prabhakar says in this fascinating excerpt from his book, The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis.
The elections in two eastern Indian states were keenly observed in Bangladesh for two major contentious issues, writes Prakash Bhandari from Dhaka.
A direct contest between nominees of the BJP-led NDA and Congress-headed Grand Alliance is on the cards in 20 constituencies
Ram Madhav has also been assigned the task of coordination with Jammu and Kashmir government, where BJP shares power with PDP.
Sources said senior leaders of the party have been told to reach out to other leaders of the alliance and talks with some parties have begun.
RS member Derek O'Brien said due to the polls, MPs of his party would not be able to attend the Parliament session.
The Congress leader said he had warned the people of Assam before the Assembly elections in 2016 that hard earned peace would be hampered if the BJP came to power.
With the CAA rules being issued, the Modi government will now start granting Indian nationality to persecuted non-Muslim migrants -- Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians -- from the three countries.
Voting for the second phase of Lok Sabha polls will be held on Friday for 88 seats in 13 states with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi seeking a second-straight term from Wayanad in Kerala.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday expressed confidence in the unity of the opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) in combating injustice nationwide, a day after Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee's decision to go solo in the Lok Sabha polls in West Bengal.
Amritpal Singh, the chief of the 'Waris Punjab De' outfit, who is lodged in Assam's Dibrugarh jail under the National Security Act, has thrown his hat into the ring as an Independent.
In the last five years, 480 candidates with declared cases related to hate speech have contested elections to state assemblies, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, the ADR said.
The central election committee of the Bharatiya Janata Party will meet on Thursday to finalise its first list of candidates for five assembly polls, with top party leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, expected to attend the meeting.
Granting interim bail to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal would not amount to grant of privilege or special status to politicians, the Supreme Court on Friday said, while observing that the Aam Aadmi Party leader has no criminal antecedents and is not a threat to the society.
Addressing a big rally in Kolkata to launch the Bharatiya Janata Party's Lok Sabha campaign, Shah launched a blistering attack on Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on the issues of appeasement, infiltration, corruption and political violence, alleging she has "destroyed" the state.
It will be in Modi's interest to reinvent his party, read the writing on the wall that voters wrote, and move ahead. He has little choice now. The country is watching, asserts Ramesh Menon.
Asserting that her government has zero tolerance to incidents of rape, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday said an amendment to existing laws will be passed in the state assembly next week to ensure capital punishment to convicted rapists.
Kharge claimed that though the BJP says the corrupt must be put in jails, when leaders facing corruption charges join the saffron party, they are "put on the lap" and sent to Rajya Sabha or assembly.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday asserted that she did not threaten junior doctors at state-run hospitals, who have been continuing cease-work for 21 days now to protest against the alleged rape and murder of a woman medic. Addressing a rally organised by the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad, Banerjee had on Wednesday urged the agitating junior doctors of Bengal to urgently consider returning to duty and said she doesn't want to lodge first information reports (FIRs) against the striking doctors in consideration of their future careers.
Senior Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi on Tuesday asserted that her party, if voted to power in Assam, will bring a new law to 'nullify' the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in the state.
Ahead of the 2022 assembly elections, Churchill Alemao 'merged' the NCP with the TMC. The 'merger' took place when Mamata Banerjee was in Mumbai talking to NCP supreme leader Sharad Pawar on how to forge Opposition unity!
The Congress appeared to have bounced back in the state's political landscape after suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of the AAP in the 2022 Punjab assembly polls.
APCC president Ripun Bora said following discussions with various parties, it has been decided that the Congress will join hands with the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India-Marxist, Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist and the Anchalik Gana Morcha.
'The win in Assam is likely to have a ripple effect in other north-eastern states like Manipur and Nagaland which have been reluctant to embrace the BJP in the past,' says Nitin A Gokhale, the distinguished commentator on strategic affairs, who lived and reported from Assam between 1983 and 2006.
It also promised financial assistance of Rs 24,000 annually to all dependent widows and single mothers, two free LPG cylinders to all the beneficiaries of the PM Ujjwala Yojana and 24x7 power supply.
Counting of votes in all elections will be held on May 2.
Former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan who heads the group said he had submitted the report on the party's performance in Kerala, Assam and Puducherry and that the assessment for West Bengal was underway.
'The BJP's tie-ups with the Bodoland People's Front and the Asom Gana Parishad have incurred the wrath of local party leaders and workers ahead of next month's assembly elections.'
For now, Modi's government appears singularly focussed on demonstrating that it is not in any way inhibited by the BJP's loss of a majority, and will continue along its patented path of bulldozing all opposition and doing just as it likes, asserts Prem Panicker.
In its complaint against Shah, the Congress told the EC that the home minister claimed in a speech in Chhattisgarh's Rajnandgaon on October 16 that "...Bhupesh Baghel's government, for appeasement politics and vote bank politics, lynched Chhattisgarh's son Bhuneshwar Sahoo and got him killed..."
Referring to section 6A of the Citizenship Act applicable exclusively to Assam, a five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud said governments have to make compromises for the overall well-being of the nation.
While EC Secretary General Umesh Sinha would be visiting Tamil Nadu next week, Deputy Election Commissioner Sudip Jain would be in West Bengal in the coming days, sources said.
Ajmal in an interview to a media house on Friday had commented on women and Hindu men as well as Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, purportedly as a rejoinder to his remarks on 'love jihad'.
While 67 per cent of India's population is 39 years old or younger, states are governed by chief ministers who are 70 or older.
What some of our leaders were up to on Monday and Tuesday.
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