The 14-year political journey of Trinamool Congress leader Mahua Moitra has encountered both upheaval and elevation, as her expulsion from Parliament in a cash-for-query case marked the culmination of her tumultuous parliamentary term.
Cricketer Yusuf Pathan will contest from the Baharampur Lok Sabha seat, whereas Kirti Aazd will fight from the Bardhaman-Durgapur constituency.
A bomb was recovered on Monday from an unclaimed bag in a train just days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Assam
Also, the thin winning margins of his last two successful campaigns are proving to be thorns for the sitting MLA.
The rebel Congress leader said he expressed his desire to join BJP and work under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah. He also discussed Assam's political and flood situation.
Here are the constituency-wise mapped leads/results for the West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu assembly elections!
"I don't want to be decided by the prime minister but he knows what he is saying is not true," Singh told reporters after casting his vote at Dispur Government High School in Guwahati.
The Congress party on Monday expelled former Member of Parliament Mani Kumar Subba from the party for six years with immediate effect for contesting election as an independent candidate from Tezpur Lok Sabha seat after he was denied ticket by the party.
The BJP has dropped C T Ravi, a leader from Karnataka, Dilip Saikia, a Lok Sabha MP from Assam, as its general secretaries, and Vinod Sonkar, Harish Dwivedi, both Lok Sabha MPs from Uttar Pradesh, and Sunil Deodhar as secretaries.
A Congress legislator in Assam on Friday filed a police complaint against party MLA Rumi Nath alleging that she along with her second husband had illegally entered his residence and beat up visitors suspecting them to be involved in the attack on the couple last week.
The Congress' Assam unit is banking heavily on party veterans to win the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections, indicates a list of the 11 candidates released by the party. The party is contesting from 13 LS constituencies out of the total 14 seats. It has left one seat to its ally Bodo People's Front.Candidates from Lakhimpur and Dhubri are yet to be announced.
In nearly 100 seats, the BJP stands almost no chance of winning. In 200 seats, it is a direct fight between the BJP and the Congress where the BJP has an upper hand. In 243 seats, the BJP is pitted against regional parties and it is not going to be easy. That is why 400 seats may end up as a pipe dream, states Ramesh Menon, author of Modi Demystified: The Making of a Prime Minister.
The Assam State Women's Commission, in its complaint, said that the former MP, who is known to have sided with a group of dissident Congress legislators, commented that Jorhat Superintendent of Police Sanjukta Parashar's 'unusual proximity' with Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi was a cause for concern.
Even as the electioneering heats up for the third and the last phase polling in Assam, main opponents the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party have drawn up electioneering strategies to outsmart each other.
Sarma, whose stock is high in Delhi had earlier captured eyeballs as the BJP's first star campaigner from the region in far away Gujarat and Delhi.
Manik Saha was named as the next chief minister of the northeastern state of Tripura at a meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party legislative party held in Agartala on Monday.
Polling is underway to elect 119 members of the Telangana Legislative Assembly, with voters queuing up to exercise their franchise amid tight security on Thursday.
The Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies are well on the way to power in two north-eastern states, and is almost certain to be part of the ruling dispensation in the third.
At least 117 Electronic Voting Machines malfunctioned and were replaced during the first phase of assembly polls in 65 constituencies in Assam, where the two-phase election process started Monday.
Electioneering for the third and the final phase of polling in Assam to be held on April 24 in six constituencies - Gauhati, Dhubri, Kokrajhar, Barpeta, Mangaldoi and Nowgong -- came to an end on Tuesday afternoon with the election department expecting a high turn out on the basis of overwhelming response of voters in the last two phases of polling in the state.
The presence of a rebel Congress candidate Mani Kumar Subba, a former MP, in the fray has complicated equations in Assam's Tezpur parliamentary constituency where Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi's choice Bhupen Kumar Borah is finding the going tough amid 'Modi wave' sweeping across the seat.
The current wave of flood has claimed 12 lives and affected nearly 16 lakh people across Assam, the state assembly was informed on Wednesday.
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.
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.
While main political parties especially Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party are engaging in high-voltage campaign in Assam, young voters, especially the first timers, sound at a loss about which party or the candidate to choose, as they are hardly convinced about the poll promises and have not been swayed by histrionics of poll candidates.
The ruling Congress in Assam is way ahead in respect of preparedness for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls compared to its arch rivals, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the regional Asom Gana Parishad.
The ruling Congress and the All India Trinamool Congress (AITMC) have the highest number of ten contestants each while the ruling party's coalition partner Bodoland Peoples' Front (BPF) has four contestants, including two sitting MLAs, in the fray.
Repolling is being held in five polling stations of four constituencies of Assam where an estimated 26 per cent voting was recorded till 12 noon Wednesday.
The Bharat Nyay Yatra will be mostly covered by bus along with short stretches of walking.
Thirty-five per cent of the 64,41,634 voters exercised their franchise till noon on Monday in five Lok Sabha constituencies of Assam where four persons clashed with CRPF personnel demanding that they be allowed to cast their vote first in Kaliabor constituency.
The 'Angh' of Oting, Tahwang, is contesting the February 27 assembly polls on a Naga People's Front (NPF) ticket against the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party MLA P Paiwang Konyak, who is a cabinet minister in the outgoing government.
As results pour in for the four states -- West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam -- and one Union Territory -- Puducherry - here's a glimpse at the leaders who are trailing and those who are leading.
For the BJP, Telangana is a sunrise state in the South, while Karnataka is a southern success despite the ups and downs.
Others were more sympathetic to the prime minister.
The fourth phase of Lok Sabha elections began on Friday, covering seven constituencies in four states where over half-a-crore voters decide the fate of 74 candidates.
The All India Congress Committee has barred all ministers and MLAs in Assam from speaking to the media about dissidence in the Assam Congress Legislature Party headed by Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi.
The rebel members of Legislative Assembly of the ruling Congress in Assam on Saturday apparently failed to cause much discomfort for veteran Tarun Gogoi, the chief minister, in the special sitting of the legislature party. At the end Gogoi came out victorious with all the MLAs promising to try winning all the 14 Lok Sabha seats for the party in Assam in the next general election.
Several states declared a holiday for schools, while government offices, other establishments and public sector banks remained closed for half a day.
In a four-cornered fight, the real battle is between Union minister Pratima Bhoumik and CPM's Kaushik Chanda.
Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Wednesday said the accused in the Kanhaiya Lal killing case in Udaipur were 'linked' to the Bharatiya Janata Party and should have been 'hanged by now' but the investigation by the National Investigation Agency was not progressing as it should.
