The former IAS officer was sworn-in as Minister of State (Independent Charge) of Tourism; and Minister of State in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
An average of nearly 78 per cent voters exercised their franchise to elect new assemblies in the key southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala and the Union territory of Puducherry on Wednesday.
The national award-winning actor had organised a mass Vishu kaineettam campaign earlier this week in Thrissur, where he unsuccessfully contested in the last assembly and Lok Sabha polls.
Public money 'looted' through an 'unholy nexus' between United Progressive Alliance politicians and bureaucrats is being used for the April 13 assembly elections in Kerala, alleged Communist Party of India-Marxist General Secretary Prakash Karat on Saturday.
Shah also said Kerala used to be known for development, literacy and for promoting tourism, but "with the ruling LDF and opposition UDF coming to power alternately has resulted in making the state a platform for political violence."
The chief minister, who reached the hospital amid protest by Democratic Youth Federation of India activists alleging lapses in the probe, consoled the mother of the victim and said steps would be taken to provide a government job to the victim's sister to support her family.
The reshuffle in the Union Cabinet, carried out on Wednesday, appears to have some focus on assembly election-bound states like Kerala and Uttar Pradesh.
Governments in most of the world saw their approval ratings dip as they struggled to contain the raging virus, which hit economy hard everywhere, but Indian politics followed a different script, with the outgoing year marking further shrinking of a rudderless Congress while the ruling BJP soared riding on Modi's enduring appeal.
In the coming days, unless Modi tones down the communal spiel, it will be clear that anxiety continues to drive his mind and clouds his judgment, observes Modi biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on Tuesday poised to form the government for a third consecutive term with the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance getting a majority in the Lok Sabha, notwithstanding crushing losses in three Hindi heartland states after a bitterly fought election that was projected as a referendum on his popularity.
The party fielded Maneka Gandhi from Sultanpur, while Uttar Pradesh minister Jitin Prasada has replaced Varun Gandhi in Pilibhit.
The plea had also sought to bar the BJP and its leaders from using the "Jai Shri Ram" slogan during the poll campaign in the state.
There was no move to advance elections to the assembly in Kerala which would be held in the mid-May next year, Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi said on Tuesday.
Looks like all political parties have thrown caution to the winds where 33 per cent reservation for women is concerned. Take the examples of Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal which recently went to polls.
Sharing his experience of the yatra so far, the Congress leader said he felt sad while talking to farmers, youth, and tribals.
The stage is now set for the first substantial round of polling in the Lok Sabha elections on Thursday, involving nearly 11 crore voters in 92 seats spread across 11 states, including Delhi and the national capital region and the riot-hit Muzaffarnagar.
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.
With mercury level soaring, Kerala is likely to face drought-like situation amid fears of drinking water scarcity and power crisis in the poll-bound state as water bodies are fast drying up.
With the issue of nationalism dominating the political discourse, the BJP on Tuesday announced a three-day programme to comemmorate Bhagat Singh's martyrdom and attacked the Congress over its MP Shashi Tharoor's remarks comparing Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union leader Kanhaiya Kumar with the freedom fighter.
Emerging from a meeting with Banerjee at the state secretariat, Yadav said that the first priority of his party was to stop the Bharatiya Janata Party's progress in West Bengal.
A farmer's son with no political lineage, K T Benny is one of the fresh faces handpicked by Rahul Gandhi in Kerala.
In the last five years, 480 candidates with declared cases related to hate speech have contested elections to state assemblies, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, the ADR said.
'I do not want to get into the number game. This time, the BJP will get unprecedented seats and vote percentage in Gujarat.'
The elections will also see for the first time a symbol, which has been created by the National School of Design, allotted to 'None of the above' that will be placed at the bottom of the list of candidates.
Muhammed Ameerul Islam was found guilty for raping and murdering the 30-year-old Dalit law student in Kerala last year.
Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal on Monday dismissed as wrong the allegations that two nuns belonging to a Kerala-based congregation were "attacked" during a train journey via Uttar Pradesh recently and alleged that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan was "making false statements" on the issue.
Lok Sabha constituencies that sprung a surprise in the 2024 polls.
The Left Democratic Front government, which assumed office in Kerala on Wednesday, decided to handover the probe into the brutal rape and murder of a 30-year old Dalit woman to a new team
Even if the BJP gets 60, 70, or even 100 per cent of the votes in the seats where it scored more than 50 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, these will still add up to only 224 seats, argues Shekhar Gupta.
A meeting of opposition leaders from many anti-Bharatiya Janata Party parties, most of them regional forces, hosted by the veteran leader and Nationalist Congress Party president Sharad Pawar on Tuesday is being seen by political pundits as a beginning of an exercise by them to join forces to put up a more cohesive challenge to the saffron party.
'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.
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.
The Communist Party of India - Marxist, the lead partner in the Left Democratic Front in Kerala has re-nominated 54 sitting members, including Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan and eight ministers. But it has also included 30 new names as candidates for the April 13 elections to the state assembly. The 91-member list also includes 10 women and seven independents. The party nominated T K Gangadharan as the candidate for Mahe segment in Puducherry.
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.
Maharashtra Opposition leader Ajit Pawar, who belongs to Nationalist Congress Party, on Saturday said Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) are trustworthy and the system cannot be manipulated by a single person.
A farmer's son with no political lineage, K T Benny was in for a surprise when his name came up as a candidate in the Kerala assembly election. Many in the state Congress also had not heard of the Youth Congress worker who turns 37 on April 13, the day of polling in Kerala.
As the curtain falls on the campaign for the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat on Wednesday, April 24, a ringside view of the closing ceremonies.
The appointments holds significance as a large number of senior leaders, who had no organisational post currently, have now been given new responsibilities.
Congress-led United Democratic Front on Friday managed to wrest power from the ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist-controlled Left Democratic Front in Kerala with a wafer-thin majority of two seats in the 140-member Assembly, in the closest poll battle in the state in three decades.
Sushil Chandra will conduct the UP, Punjab, Goa, Manipur, Uttarakhand elections before he retires in May 2022.
