If there is unity in the Opposition, it is only about regional parties other than the DMK not wanting Rahul Gandhi or any other Congress leader for prime minister, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have refused to meet Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha.
Punjab Congress president Navjot Singh Sidhu on Wednesday once again trained his guns on former state chief minister Amarinder Singh, calling him a 'fraud,' 'coward' and a 'crybaby.'
Of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state, BJP will contest 20, while the JD-U, LJP and RLSP will contest 12, five and two seats respectively.
On chances of taking uncle Shivpal Yadav's Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party Lohia along in the polls, he said, "I dont have any problem in this. He and his men will be given due honour".
The JD-U has insisted that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is the leader of the alliance and it has been the "senior partner" in the state, indicating that it should get a major share.
Leave alone taking forward the seat-sharing talks with the existing and probable allies, the Mahagathbandhan remains an amorphous entity weeks before the first phase of polling on October 28, a situation that will make the rival NDA camp, which in any case looks sitting pretty, all the more happier.
While Yadav began to tour different constituencies and address public meetings to mobilise the SP rank and file, he has concurrently started the tedious process of cobbling up an alliance of smaller outfits representing a mlange of castes and sub-castes, reports Virendra Singh Rawat.
The AAP has been batting for tie up with Congress citing the need to defeat the BJP and replace the Modi government in the national interest.
Haasan said several parties have initiated discussions for a possible alliance with the MNM and he "shook hands" with the All India Samathuva Makkal Katchi.
From Chief Minister EK Palaniswami to Seeman to TTV Dhinakaran to elder brother M K Azhagiri, everyone's favourite target these days seems to the DMK chief Stalin, which is good news in an election year, but that doesn't mean he is going to sweep the polls, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Mukesh Sahni's move to contest 55 seats in the UP assembly polls antagonised top BJP leaders.
'Leave alone top gear, we are in the neutral and when we are applying gears, we are applying reverse'
The DMK chief, recalling the origin of the recent differences, said Algiri had issued a statement that Congress was allocated lesser number of president and vice-president seats (in indirect polls) to head district panchayats and panchayat unions.
The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday said the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam would decide on accommodating V K Sasikala, confidante of late chief minister of Tamil Nadu J Jayalalithaa, in the ruling party-led alliance for the April 6 assembly polls.
'At the moment, we are supporting the Nitish Kumar-led government.' 'When the time comes for this government to fall, it will.'
EPS' real test will commence with a decision whether or not to patch up with OPS and on what terms -- and then, to decide whether or not to have the BJP for an electoral ally, come 2024, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has decided to contest 160 of the 243 assembly seats in the upcoming polls, leaving 83 other seats to its three allies.
A NCP source said his party is claiming Aurangabad, Pune, Yavatmal from the Congress quota since it was "better placed to win".
'Akhilesh did politics like Rabi and Kharif crop which come once a year. Politics is not seasonal, you have to harvest your field all through the year and only then you get a good crop' Political analyst lists 12 reasons why Akhilesh Yadav lost the UP elections.
The BJP's vote share in Punjab has been declining -- 8.21 per cent in 2007 to 7.13 per cent in 2012, and finally to 5.4 per cent in 2017, when it won just three of 23 seats the party contested. So doing an election deal with Amarinder and a political formation he might float in the future is not inconceivable.
'If Nitish Kumar is given more seats, then no one can stop the NDA from losing, even the BJP will be wiped out.'
The Lok Sabha MP from Maldaha Dakshin said Congress' alliance partner Communist Party of India-Marxist forged a tie-up with Indian Secular Front of Furfura Sharif cleric Abbas Siddiqui as it feared it will not be able to win a single seat.
The Hindutva social media continues to present the DMK especially as anti-god, anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmin. The strategy did not work in the past, it has not worked in the present, and would not work in the future, as a massive vote-getter, asserts N Sathiya Moorthy.
Without strategising together, Jayalalithaa's successor, Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, and M Karunanidhi's son-cum-successor, M K Stalin, have used tough-talking on seat-sharing with allies, to replace charisma that they purportedly lacked, during the run-up to the assembly polls scheduled for April 6, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
The announcement comes a day after the opposition's Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) allotted just one seat to the Left parties in Bihar.
The order issued by Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla is a slight modification of the reopening guidelines issued on September 30 where the political gatherings were allowed from October 15. The political gatherings can be held only outside the containment zones.
A senior BJP leader from Bihar said that a strategy has been worked out to ensure Tejashwi's defeat from the Raghopur seat in Vaishali district, from where he is also the sitting MLA.
Rajbhar said the seat-sharing talks with the BJP remained unsuccessful.
Yadav vowed to dislodge the government headed by Nitish Kumar, whom Congress leader Avinash Pandey in his address accused of "apharan" (hijacking) of the mandate in the previous elections.
A recent pre-election survey suggests that AAP may win 53 seats in the 117-member Punjab assembly and reduce the Congress to just 43.
The compulsions of the Hindutva vote bank over 25 years in Maharashtra have made the two parties the oldest ideological partners and it is unrealistic to believe the situation has changed, reports Sunil Gatade.
From devising a seat-sharing formula for the National Democratic Alliance in Bihar for the 2019 Lok Sabha election to wooing young voters, the former poll strategist has ensured his position as number 2 within the party.
"You can see all of us working together. There is no discontent. The problem is, today newspapers have more pages than before, news channels run 24X7 and then there is social media where anybody can say anything without worrying about backing a claim with facts," he said.
A day after the ice was broken, Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party leaders on Saturday held talks to end the tangle over seat-sharing for Maharashtra Assembly polls but failed to reach a consensus with BJP rejecting Sena's formula offering it 125 seats to contest and instead upped its ante by suggesting a new proposal.
Any defeat for the BJP now would imply that anti-incumbency against Modi has set in, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
In a series of tweets, Shah also questioned Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi whether they support the People's Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD), a conglomerate of regional and national political parties in Jammu and Kashmir formed to demand the restoration of the Article 370, scrapped last year.
The seat-sharing talks between the two parties are likely to conclude in a day or two, a BJP source said.
The pirzada said that the newly launched outfit might contest state elections from all 294 assembly seats.
'Yogi Adityanath is working for one caste only and suppressing the others,' Bihar Minister and NDA ally Mukesh Sahni tells M I Khan.
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