With the unanticipated floods across Tamil Nadu catching the unprepared administration unawares, Stalin finds that some of the early positives that had rubbed on his initiatives have been lost, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Keeping their eyes on the assembly elections, the BJP has been trying to win favour with the southern regional parties, observes R Rajagopalan
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin on Thursday said he has requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to provide additional doses of COVID-19 vaccine to the state.
Though the wily TRS supremo, credited with achieving the separate state of Telangana, stopped short of saying he was about to declare dissolution of the assembly, none doubted its imminence.
Several parties had requested that the session, which was originally scheduled to continue till April 8, be curtailed due to the five assembly elections being held in eight phases till April 29.
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.
'It's a natural alliance and this alliance has been has been formed without compromising the core ideology of the AIADMK.'
In UP and Bengal, it is willing to sacrifice its interests to stop the BJP and would work towards ensuring the BJP did not win incremental seats in Odisha and Telangana.
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.
Seen by political watchers as the favourite to retain power for a third straight term, the Bharatiya Janata Party has set itself an ambitious target of winning 370 Lok Sabha seats, a goal aimed as much at projecting its strength as at diminishing the opposition in popular imagination.
AIADMK coordinator O Panneerselvam is said to be upset at his son Raveendranath Kumar, a Lok Sabha MP, being denied a ministerial chance for a second time in a row, beginning with the formation of Modi 2.0 in 2019, reveals N Sathiya Moorthy.
The contemporary problem with the BJP in Tamil Nadu is that it has been trying hard to package the DMK especially as anti-god and anti-Hinduism, and seeking it to link to Periyar and M Karunanidhi, and by extension to Stalin, the latter's son and successor to the party mantle. Their hope was to consolidate the perceived 'pro-god, pro-religion votes', which they saw returning to the fold post-MGR, post-Jayalalithaa. But no such substantial vote-bank existed even in Periyar's time, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
On its own or with allies the Congress has a strong presence in states that account for a total of 253 LS seats, or 20 short of the magic figure of 272 required to form a government at the Centre. So what is Mamata Banerjee talking about, asks N Sathiya Moorthy.
Sidhu made the sharp retort amid speculation that the former cricketer is himself eyeing the top post if the Congress wins next month's assembly polls.
"From the days of print media and radio, dissemination of news has reached the era of television, with people switching on television sets the moment they wake up to know what is happening in the world," he said after inaugurating Raj News, a 24-hour Tamil news channel from Raj Network Limited.
Cassandras and Congressis may sneer at the findings, but the Times Now poll indicated that the Modi government was very much on its way to a second term.
Union Minister Smriti Irani on Friday described the Congress-Dravida Munetra Kazhagam alliance for the May 16 Assembly polls in Tamil Nadu as an "unholy" one while bringing up the 2G spectrum allocation scam.
