Team Anna member Arvind Kejriwal faced some protests on Tuesday as he decided to leave for Goa for campaigning without casting his vote in the Uttar Pradesh polls but in an anti-climax he could not exercise his franchise as his name was missing from the electoral rolls.
Lalu Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal was derecognised as a national party by the Election Commission on Friday, a decision that comes ahead of the assembly polls in Bihar.
Campaigning ended on Wednesday evening for 102 Lok Sabha seats across 21 states and Union territories which will go to polls in the first phase on April 19 with top leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance and the opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) making a last-gasp effort to woo voters.
There are of course, other ways to win elections including intimidation of voters, gerrymandering, fiddling electoral rolls, booth-capturing and other creative forms of rigging.
The Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party-led opposition alliance in Maharashtra will win 35 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats, senior BJP leader Gopinath Munde claimed here today.
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.
Senior tax officials were told to focus on cash collection from the arrears so that the target for FY23 was achieved and the overall revenue position improved.
"Our electoral rolls revised according to the newly delimited constituencies will be ready by August 31," the CEC told reporters when asked whether the commission was ready to conduct Lok Sabha elections as per the redrawn constituencies.
Modi's inability to make peace with a renewed Opposition will only embolden his coalition partners and it is just a matter of time before they begin asking probing questions besides politely disagreeing with his tactics, predicts Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
The prime minister has been unstoppable as he transported the BJP to colossal success on a wave of muscular nationalism, majoritarian pride and charisma.
The Congress leader said he sought to know whether the cooker blast was as big as the terrorist attack in Mumbai, Delhi or Kashmir.
In an attempt to curb bogus voting and monitor the migration of voters across India, the Election Commission is planning to link the Census data of 2011 with its electoral rolls. The EC then plans to use global positioning system to automatically record the voters' migration or shifting of residence.Once the Census data is made available to the Election Commission, it will be clubbed with the electoral rolls. The GPS chip would be added to the electronic photo identity cards.
According to the schedule, the final publication of the electoral roll, with January 1, 2008 as the qualifying date, should be published by January 10. Though the terms of some assemblies in the northeast expire in March, there was no indication from the EC yet on whether elections in Karnataka could be held simultaneously to pave way for installation of an elected government at the earliest.
...educated people are better decision-makers must be rejected, the CJI said.
The constituency fell vacant after the death of sitting member and then Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa on December 5 last.
Smartly blending its development agenda with Hindutva politics, the BJP has not lost assembly elections in the state since 1995.
The 78-year-old Naveen is on the cusp of creating history. He must win the forthcoming Assembly polls to become India's longest-serving chief minister, a record held by Sikkim's Pawan Kumar Chamling.
The Himachal effect could be replicated in Narendra Modi-run Gujarat, where the PCC chief Bharat Solanki and CLP leader Arjun Modwadia could meet a similar fate, party sources said.
The commission is keen to see that the annual school examinations are not affected in any manner by the election. In some places the examinations end early April.
Former Bihar chief minister and BJP ally Jitan Ram Manjhi alleged on Wednesday that five MPs, including a Union minister, have been elected to Lok Sabha from seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes on the basis of "forged" certificates and sought an inquiry.
With just 50 days to go for the polling day, the commission might get more tough.
The Front partners welcomed the visit of the 19-member team ahead of Assembly elections.
The observers would submit a report and brief the Commission on January 18, the sources said.
Ahead of the upcoming elections, political parties have started announcing incentives to benefit women, but what do women truly seek for genuine gender parity, asks Nivedita Mookerji.
'Kejriwal could have easily deputed someone to step in as chief minister, but being the authoritative and self-centered personality that he is, he chose not to do it.' 'If the AAP loses Delhi, where it has a huge majority, the only one to blame would be Kejriwal,' asserts Ramesh Menon.
The announcement came days after it issued a formal direction that VVPAT will be used at polling stations in all future elections where polls are held using EVMs.
Elections to Bihar Assembly before November 22: EC
These five documents are: NRC of 1951, voter list of 1966, voter list of 1971, refugee registration certificate till 1971 and ration card issued till 1971.
A PIL has sought a CBI probe into the presence of nearly two crore illegal Bangladeshi migrants in India and striking their names off the electoral rolls.
For a country with a huge atheist vote bank, relatively few claim to be irreligious, says Devangshu Datta
Whether it was the MGNREGS or the NFSA or the Aadhaar-based DBT scheme for cash transfer, the Modi government has built on the basic architecture created by the Singh government. Policy makers in the Modi government, instead of discarding them as products of the previous political regime, worked on them, expanded their scope and reach, and used new tools to improve their performance, explains A K Bhattacharya.
The next general elections would be held in multiple phases next year and be completed in time to constitute the 16th Lok Sabha by June 1, Chief Election Commissioner V S Sampath has said.
Moving to overturn a Supreme Court ruling, a bill was introduced in Rajya Sabha under which convicted members of Parliament and members of Legislative Assembly cannot be disqualified immediately even though they will be barred from voting in the House and drawing their salary till their appeal is decided.
What our netas did a day before Delhi went to the polls
The notification for the Congress president's election will be out on September 22 by when all the PCC delegates will be finalised and electoral roll published and the election, if required, will be held on October 17.
The Assam Public Works, the original petitioner in the Supreme Court which led to the updation of the National Register of Citizens six years ago, wondered whether the software used in the updation exercise was capable to handle so much data and if it was examined by any third party Information Technology expert.
Following the party's sweep of assembly elections in three Hindi heartland states against the odds, the BJP's brain trust is now busy game-planning as to how it can improve on its 2019 Lok Sabha election tally of 303 seats.
It also made clear that the deadline for verifying the claims for inclusion in the NRC would be now February 15, 2019 instead of February 1.
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