Will the Aam Aadmi Party repeat its magic or are Delhi voters going to reprimand it for party chief Arvind Kejriwal's maverick 49-day chief ministership in the upcoming state assembly elections? Search for the answer led me to party ideologue Yogendra Yadav, who appears to have some justification and back-of-the-envelope calculations to suggest that his party stands a chance, despite rival Bharatiya Janata Party's surge in other recent state polls.
The Bhartiya Janata Party along with the Lok Janshakti Party are all set to fight a pitched political battle against the ruling Janata Dal-United and also the Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal combine in Bihar. But there's one thing in common between the five major parties of the state -- all of them have fielded bahubalis, criminal-turned-politicians and their wives in the upcoming Lok Sabha election.
These elections will be remembered for the AAP and Arvind Kejriwal, feels Neeta Kolhatkar.
No one at this point no one in the state is talking about a clean sweep with high victory margins that the AIADMK front won in the 2011 assembly elections. The 'Modi factor', as against a 'Modi wave', has ensured as much, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party could suffer in the Lok Sabha polls due to "overconfidence" as its campaign is going on the lines of its 2004 "India shining" slogan, nationalist Congress Party chief and Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said on Thursday.
The Prithviraj Chavan government wants to retain its strongholds and ensure there is negligible anti-incumbency. That many of its decisions can run into legal problems is not an immediate worry, says Neeta Kolhatkar.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is facing revolt from within in Bihar on a day when the Election Commission announced the schedule for the Lok Sabha polls to be held in April, May.
Enthused over Congress' victory in three out of four Assembly seats in Rajasthan, state party president Sachin Pilot on Tuesday said people have rejected the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party for brutal "misuse" of power.
The Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana has joined the saffron alliance in Maharashtra. Will the votes it brings to the table loosen the political hold of the entrenched Maratha-dominated sugar barons of the NCP-Congress in western Maharashtra?
A Ganesh Nadar's tales from the campaign trail.
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.
'...Take him in the sense that I will defeat him. This is just our military term... If there's anybody today who's anti this government, it is the youth of Punjab. All of them are being coerced, there are no jobs being created, all of them are taking to drugs because of frustration... There is no Narendra Modi factor, there is no national anti-incumbency. In Punjab there in only anti-Akali incumbency.' Former Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, once the Maharaja of Patiala, pulls no punches when taking about his rivals, especially his BJP opponent from Amritsar Arun Jaitley and the Badals, in this no-holds-barred interview with Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com
Thousands of people may have gathered at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Stadium in Hyderabad on Sunday to attend a rally by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi but it remains to be seen whether the mammoth turnout will actually translate into votes for the Bharatiya Janata Party in Andhra Pradesh.
Praveen Chakravarty gives a summary of Amit Shah's master strategy that helped the BJP emerge victorious in the recent Assembly elections
Medhavi Kirti, the granddaughter of late veteran Congress leader Babu Jagjiwan Ram, has been campaigning against her aunt Meira Kumar, Lok Sabha Speaker and Congress candidate from Sasaram Lok Sabha seat in Bihar.
Thirty-five per cent of the 64,41,634 voters exercised their franchise till noon on Monday in five Lok Sabha constituencies of Assam where four persons clashed with CRPF personnel demanding that they be allowed to cast their vote first in Kaliabor constituency.
Though the 2019 alliance talks, if any, are a long way off, CM Jaya's current state of health and her long hospitalisation maybe a facilitating factor for the AIADMK to consider any BJP initiative favourably at the time, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
New government will have to mobilise money to complete pending irrigation, infra projects
While main political parties especially Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party are engaging in high-voltage campaign in Assam, young voters, especially the first timers, sound at a loss about which party or the candidate to choose, as they are hardly convinced about the poll promises and have not been swayed by histrionics of poll candidates.
As veteran Bharatiya Janata Party leader Jaswant Singh and former Union minister and vice president of the BJP Kisan Morcha Subhash Maharia have now made the infighting within the saffron party in Rajasthan public, chances of the ruling party touching the mark of 25 seats now seems impossible, say political observers. Shahnawaz Akhtar reports
As the mercury keeps moving up in the wake of rising temperature, poll fever is also soaring northward in Tamil Nadu which will witness a fierce fight for the 39 Lok Sabha seats between ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, even as a six-party BJP-led alliance is trying to play spoilsport.
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi asked partymen to focus on Bharatiya Janata Party's return to power at the Centre instead of projecting anyone including him as the prime ministerial candidate.
Further hardening his stand on seat-sharing with Bharatiya Janata Party, Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray on Monday said he has rejected the saffron ally's demand for contesting 135 seats in Maharashtra assembly polls and hinted at going it alone, saying "everything has an alternative".
While Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy is considering staying away from mainstream politics for a few months after resigning, Seema-Andhra MPs are gearing up to join the BJP or YSR Congress. Vicky Nanjappa reports
Rejecting Congress' charge that projects he has been inaugurating in recent months were all started during their time, he said, as prime minister, he would have been happy if the projects were completed 15 years back and led to creation of jobs.
'There is no food to eat and water to drink and people are migrating in hordes.' 'Chief Minister Fadnavis must shift his base to Marathwada in such times.' 'If you do not help during a drought, then when will you help?'
Assam minister Dr Himanta Bishwa Sarma who on Monday quit from the Tarun Gogoi cabinet said that he had been forced to take the step after the Congress leadership had repeatedly ignored the representations made by the rebel MLAs about the 'inefficient' handling of affairs by the chief minister.
'For short-term gain, the BJP makes extraordinary promises, they take extraordinary decisions, but in the long term it is going to impact both them and the country.'
Haven't we all united behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi, our national saviour-cum-reform evangelist? How can we still be in thrall to regionalist impulses, asks Vikram Johri
As Bihar decides its fate on Sunday, political leaders from across the spectrum weighed in.
Joining hands with his arch rival, Lalu Prasad Yadav, paid off for the Bihar chief minister
After weeks of bargaining, discussing and protesting, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Telugu Desam Party came to a seat-sharing arrangement for the May 7 polls in Andhra Pradesh on Sunday. But will this combine be able to achieve the same feat it did in 1999, asks Vicky Nanjappa.
Kejriwal in his public meetings took up issues, which garnered him strong support
If Modi and Shah did not project Adityanath as CM, it was out of expediency, says Radhika Ramaseshan.
Even as Kiran Kumar Reddy has quit the Congress and resigned as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, protesting against the division of the state, veteran Congress leader and Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh says he, too, will quit the party if its central leadership removes him from the post of chief minister, after the elections.
With several Congress leaders pushing for Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda's removal, the Congress is finding it difficult to keep its flock together in the poll-bound state. Rediff.com contributor Anita Katyal reports.
Modi government has pledged to lay 700,000 kms of broadband cable.
Pankaja Munde -- who lit the funeral pyre of her father Gopinath Munde on Wednesday at his ancestral village of Parli in Maharasthra along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party general secretary Amit Shah -- will lead the the Bharatiya Janata Party's campaign for the assembly elections scheduled for later this year.
Politically, it will not be easy for Modi to take hard decisions such as raising fuel prices in the first budget, given the risk of higher inflation.
The Modi wave has blotched the Congress party's copybook. For the first time since the Lok Sabha was constituted in 1952, the party has failed to secure enough seats to be designated as a parliamentary party, notes A Surya Prakash.
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