The Bharatiya Janata Party appeared to cede ground in Uttar Pradesh where Samajwadi Party was leading on six of the 11 Assembly seats where bypolls were held while it was neck and neck with Congress in Gujarat and behind in Rajasthan, exactly four months after it swept the three states in Lok Sabha elections.
In the couple of hours that you spend in the riot-hit city you find it is not the BJP that is asking for the votes of an excited section of Hindus, but it is the people who are clinging to Narendra Modi. Rediff.com's Sheela Bhatt reports on the sentiment on the ground in Muzaffarnagar, whose Hindu-Muslim fracture is a long way from being mended.
While refuting media reports about her plans to contest the forthcoming Lok Sabha election, Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati on Thursday went all out to woo the state's Muslims, by training her guns at the entire brigade along with its prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modi.
If the Ganga manages a rebirth, so will the country.Roy
This time however, the poll panel did not share the overall polling percentage at its briefing.
Kota, Rajasthan, is both a beacon for the educationally deprived and a cynical place in which 16-year-olds live in Dickensian boarding houses, while teachers drive Audis.
Barring Maharashtra, the poll percentage in rest of the states was in excess of 60 per cent while in Puducherry it was 80.47 per cent.
With a rise in the clout of Muslims in western Uttar Pradesh, fearful Hindus are being radicalised.
'Kanpur and Hoogly district are the most polluted on the Ganga.'
'The reason I call Dadri a landmark turning point in our politics is the relatively muted response of the self-styled secular forces.' 'Top leaders of the Congress haven't even taken a padyatra to the village, just a 40 minute drive from Delhi. Lalu, Nitish, Mamata, all claimants to the secular vote, are afraid of messing with an issue involving the cow.' 'Holiness of the cow has now become as multi-partisan an issue as hostility to Pakistan,' says Shekhar Gupta.
Muslims constitute 20% of UP's electorate. Currently, Muslim voters are divided between Akhilesh's SP and Mayawati's BSP. What will tilt the balance? Can Muslims back the winning party? Mohammad Sajjad explains the mysteries of UP's Muslim politics.
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