Kerala has never witnessed such a close call in assembly elections in its history, as it did this year. It was indeed a photo finish between the Congress-led United Democratic Front and the Communist party of India-Marxist led Left Democratic Front today. It was like a thrilling Twenty20 match with one batsman pitching in with a spectacular performance. The LDF has managed to win as many as 68 seats, against 72 of the UDF, only because of the goodwill of V S Achuthanandan.
With Malayalis immune to Modi's charms, the Pradhan Sevak must be quite unhappy today, surmises Dominic Xavier.
Shiromani Akali Dal patriarch Parkash Singh Badal (94) became the country's oldest candidate to fight elections as he filed his nomination papers from Lambi on Monday.
The party was trounced in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and is now left with only Himachal Pradesh in the north. It is ruling in only three states on its own and is in power in Bihar and Jharkhand as a junior partner in alliance with regional parties.
Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sushma Swaraj on Tuesday refuted the Congress charge as 'baseless' that her party had not fielded a candidate against Kerala Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan in the April 13 assembly elections as part of a secret pact with the ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist.
This is a brief background of the new Cabinet Ministers.
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.
The CPI-M leader was the chief minister of the state from 2000 to 2011.
Over the last five days, Modi visited all of south, held roadshows, made an aggressive bid for his party, and took on the rivals with full gusto, especially the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi in Telangana that was in power for 10 years.
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.
By keeping the Sanatana Dharma row alive and adding the Ayodhya temple consecration scheduled for January 22 and adding the free darshan promise from four polled states to the entire country, the BJP may have a self-fulfilling concoction, predicts N Sathiya Moorthy.
The None of the Above option, like previous polls, had few takers in the assembly elections to West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry.
The CPI-M's allegations were termed a political conspiracy by the opposition Congress which accused the Left party of stooping low to target its political opponents.
'The path of militant Hindutva that the BJP's national leadership chose as its main electoral plank literally dug the grave for the party in Kerala,' says M K Bhadrakumar.
Azad, who is a prominent member of the group of 23 leaders who had demanded organisational overhaul in the Congress, said that for the next two months the party is the top priority.
Celebrities and politicians made a beeline for polling stations in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, as both the states go to the polls on Monday.
Modi hit out at the Congress for its president Mallikarjun Kharge's attempt to play down his party's poor show in the polls by describing it as "small state elections".
In the event that like in the 17th Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi again gets locked out of the House, the Congress needs a second-in-command who will keep the momentum going inside Parliament, notes Saisuresh Sivaswamy.
The ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist on Monday took a veiled dig at the Congress by asking it to safeguard its newly elected Karnataka MLAs from being poached by the Bharatiya Janata Party as was allegedly done by the saffron party in Goa amidst the Bharat Jodo Yatra.
The victory of the ruling Congress-led United Democratic Front in 12 of the 20 Lok Sabha seats in the state has made Chief Minister Oommen Chandy stronger as Kerala is one of the few states that bucked the anti-Congress trend in the country.
Every passing day featuring parties within the INDIA alliance sniping at each other at state level is bad publicity for the alliance particularly given the proximity of the 2024 general elections, asserts Shyam G Menon.
Communist Party of India-Marxist Polit Bureau member Pinarayi Vijayan will be the next Chief Minister of Kerala.
'They have been pursuing their agenda of bulldozing everything and everybody on their way.' 'They suddenly see Rahul Gandhi standing in front of them without fear and fighting against them aggressively.' 'He doesn't show any compromise in his attitude towards fascism.'
In four years, the state has had to battle cyclones, two floods, and two epidemiological disasters. If people bring Pinarayi Vijayan back to power, he must have done something right, obsevers Aditi Phadnis.
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.
The IMD has warned of heatwave to severe heatwave conditions in parts of West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh during the next five days.
Stalin said one cannot and should not decide the mood of the entire country based on the results of one state elections.
There are 64 vacancies in the legislative assemblies of various states and one in Lok Sabha.
The people of Amethi want to rectify their 'mistake' of 2019 and Congress workers as well as leaders are demanding that Rahul Gandhi contest from the constituency in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the party's Uttar Pradesh chief Ajay Rai said.
The IUML leadership viewed the actions of Khader, a two-time legislator, as serious despite his explanation that it was not a meeting of the RSS, but only a cultural event.
This is the first time that third gender figures in the state electoral roll.
As Modi takes guard for a third term with trusted and seasoned hands around him, the BJP is hopeful that he will prove his detractors wrong and continue to fuel the party's expansion horizontally and vertically with his inventive policies in government and new set of ideas in politics with the core of Hindutva, development and welfarism remaining intact.
As the curtain falls on the campaign for the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat on Wednesday, April 24, a ringside view of the closing ceremonies.
Is there more than meets the eye to Kitex Garments, the world's second-largest children's garment producer, abandoning Kerala for Telangana?
The Lok Sabha contest in Thiruvananthapuram is shaping up to be a significant battle involving key candidates like Shashi Tharoor, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, and Panniyan Ravindran. This three-cornered fight highlights the political dynamics in Kerala's capital city, with each candidate bringing their own vision and promises for the region's development, notes Rajeev Srinivasan.
There are few leaders in the Opposition line up who can claim a path to party leadership like Sitaram Yechury and certainly, very few who blended that ascent through student politics with awareness about non-elite real India, urban India and liberal politics, as he did, notes Shyam G Menon.
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.
It is early to make out which way the wind is blowing, but there is no denying that challenges for the BJP, far outweigh the advantages in this region, notes Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
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