'This time, even the professedly secular parties have maintained a conscious distance from being identified with Muslims.' 'This could be interpreted as a success of the BJP campaign of what it has been calling 'minority appeasement', says Mohammad Sajjad.
Pakistan Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the government's plea to issue an order for the eviction of protesters besieging the Parliament, saying it is an administrative matter and should be dealt with in accordance with the law.
In the event of a triangular contest the winning party will need about 40 per cent of the votes polled. And it is here that the votes of the numerically smaller communities will come into play.
The districts going to polls in this phase are Balrampur, Gonda, Faizabad, Ambedkar Nagar, Bahraich, Shravasti, Basti, Siddharth Nagar, Sant Kabir Nagar, Amethi and Sultanpur.
In a daring attack inside the court complex in Faizabad, two persons allegedly threw crude bombs and opened fire at a local politician, prompting his gunners to retaliate, killing one of the attackers.
The Rajya Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh on Saturday saw cross-voting by a BJP MLA while another party legislator claimed that she was prevented from voting.
In provocative remarks, Congress leader and Union Minister Beni Prasad Verma has warned that Narendra Modi will be in jail in six months time if Rahul Gandhi becomes the prime minister.
Even as the BJP dithers over what it needs to do, the Congress has stolen a lead by projecting its chief ministerial candidate -- Priyanka Vadra nee Gandhi, says Nazarwala, the man who called the 2012 UP assembly elections right.
Besides the polarisation in favour of the BJP, there could be other reasons for the under-representation of Muslims too, says Shafeeq Rahman.
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.
While making it clearly evident that he would contest the next Lok Sabha election from Sultanpur -- regarded as the bastion of the Gandhi family -- Varun did not hesitate to align with a local history-sheeter and former Bahujan Samaj Party MLA Chandrabhadra Singh alias Sonu Singh, who was inducted into the BJP barely 24 hours ago.
The ruling Samajwadi Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh seem to be making the most of the prevailing crisis in Moradabad to serve their political ends.
BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is predicted to win both seats -- Varanasi and Vadodara. Kejriwal is places at number 2 in Varanasi, says the ABP News-Nielsen exit poll. Senior BJP leader L K Advani is likely to win the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha for the sixth time.
'Shashi Tharoor has publicised whatever little he has done, far more than what he has actually done. Some of the bigger promises he made could never be implemented.' Ajit Joy, a former police officer and Aam Aadmi Party candidate from Thiruvananthapuram, tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier that he is a more attractive candidate in his constituency than sitting MP Tharoor.
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