'Someone who cannot even take his cabinet into confidence, how will he take the NDA alliance into confidence?'
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.
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 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.
As Election 2024 hurtles towards result day in a medley of mangalsutra, mujra, mutton, machli and other barbs, these may sound like character names from Hindi comics of yore. Instead, these are the mocking, sometimes vicious monikers given by political rivals to each other.
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.
The mandate will help further the development agenda in these states, with good governance and policy reforms taking centrestage
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.
Chowdhury said the schedule of the yatra was submitted to the state administration long ago.
'Everything was sacrosanct when the BJP was led by Vajpayee and Advani.' 'That was a different culture. But with Modi and Amit Shah nothing is sacrosanct.'
They handed the apology letter to Akal Takht Jathedar Giani Raghbir Singh at the Akal Takht Secretariat at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. The Akal Takht is the supreme temporal seat of the Sikhs.
Heatwave conditions have been prevailing in Odisha since April 15 and the Gangetic West Bengal since April 17, according to the MeT department.
While the Aam Aadmi Party is contesting on four seats, the Congress has fielded candidates for the remaining three seats.
Over 73.44 lakh voters exercised their franchise in 10,592 polling stations spread over 13 districts in the Barak Valley, the hill regions and parts of central and lower Assam.
It's intriguing that the prime minister now wants his American partner to help protect the Hindu minority in Bangladesh. That's conceding to the Americans a pre-eminence India has always contested, resented and feared, asserts Shekhar Gupta.
'The victory is an expression of agrarian distress and social turmoil.'
'After the NRC it is proved that whatever the BJP was saying about illegal Bangladeshi migrant was a lie and Indian Muslims have their documents to prove their citizenship.'
Constituency-wise verdict of the five-state aasembly elections.
The 84-year old veteran Congressman, who died from post-COVID complications on Monday, was a Nehru-Gandhi family loyalist.
The BJP-led alliance in Assam is all set to form the government for the second successive term winning 72 of the 102 seats declared so far and is leading in three others.
The first election that the US and UK-trained Conrad Sangma, who now runs the National People's Party (NPP) formed by his father PA Sangma, fought in 2004 had resulted in a narrow defeat.
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.
Trinamool Congress sources on Wednesday claimed the Congress delayed the talks and made unreasonable demands on seat-sharing without acknowledging the ground reality.
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.
A dominant force in the country's politics for decades, the grand old party's free fall continued as it lost Punjab to AAP and finished with just two seats out of 403 in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.
BJP is set to win majority of 32 municipality boards and 42 town committees in Assam
The Trinamool Congress registered a decisive victory in West Bengal on Sunday, contrary to results of most exit polls which predicted a tight race between the BJP and the TMC with an edge to the Mamata Banerjee-led party.
Modi wants the BJP to gets an additional 10% of the vote share from what it won in 2019. Plans are afoot to get new faces to replace MPs with poor chances of winning. Sources say more than 100 MPs are like to be axed, notes Modi biographer Ramesh Menon.
The rejig may take place before the assembly election results for Assam, Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.
With the Election Commission (EC) facing flak from some quarters for announcing eight-phase Assembly polls in West Bengal, officials on Friday said the polling had to be spread out due to festivals, the movement of security forces and an increased number of polling stations keeping in mind the Covid protocols.
The results for the polls will be announced on May 18, Election Commission sources said.
More than 750 constituencies spread across four states and one union territory will go to the polls on Tuesday
The North East is a sizeable success story for the Modi government politically and for the BJP electorally. It will be an unpleasant surprise if they choose to blow it, bowing to their basic, polarising instinct at any point, points out Shekhar Gupta.
Sarma said no NDA partner will enter into any alliance with either Congress or the Trinamool Congress after the results are declared on Thursday.
The setback promises to have far-reaching ramifications within and outside the party as it is likely to fuel voices that have challenged the Gandhi family's leadership and also those who have been a votary of a non-Congress front to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The Bharatiya Janata Party-Asom Gana Parishad alliance swept the Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) polls on Sunday, bagging 58 out of the total 60 wards, while the main opposition party Congress drew a blank.
Karnataka would vote on May 10, and the results will be declared on May 13.
The real brilliance of this RSS campaign, therefore, lies in building a dominant power base with, and for, a mostly non-RSS leadership. That is why the rise of the BJP in Assam is their stand-out victory, says Shekhar Gupta.
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.
'The significance and timing of the PM's start of the campaign journey from Silchar is a clear message that the Barak valley is a priority in his scheme of things,' notes Subimal Bhattacharjee.
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