Announcing the name of candidates for the West Bengal assembly polls, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday said she will be contesting from the Nandigram constituency as announced earlier.
While Opposition MLAs in other states are dumping their parties to join the Bharatiya Janata Party, Tripura is seeing a reverse trend.
Once a reviled practice in the state, both the parties seem to have endorsed a record number of turncoats this time -- triggering a wave of discontentment among their loyalists.
Our election slogan is simple "Ballot for Bullet".
Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad announced Adhikari's name as leader of the BJP legislature party in the assembly after a meeting of the legislators at the party's Hastings office.
If only the Congress could rebuild on its strengths and develop a modern enough ideology, we could again be moving towards a clearer two-party political landscape, asserts Shekhar Gupta.
The statehood issue and implementation of the sixth schedule of the Constitution have been the major demands in the hills since the beginning of the protracted Gorkhaland movement in 1986.
'Winning this election will take us a step closer to realising our dreams'
'More than losing Bengal, the worry for their national leadership is the current crisis.' 'If people perceive that the government does not do enough, then there's trouble.'
Fighting as an independent, Dinakaran was up against ruling AIADMK's E Madhusudanan and DMK's N Maruthu Ganesh.
Indicating a shift in stand, Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut on Thursday said his party is open to consider quitting Maharashtra's ruling alliance Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) if the rebel MLAs camping in Assam return and discuss their grievances with CM Uddhav Thackeray, while coalition allies Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress vowed support to the beleaguered governing bloc and asserted its majority can only be determined in the assembly and not outside.
The list, which is a mix of seasoned political players and greenhorns, has 17 women candidates, five more than the last elections, constituting roughly 41 per cent of the candidates.
Beset by troubles on multiple fronts within, the Congress faces the danger of imploding with party veterans Ghulam Nabi Azad and Kapil Sibal on Wednesday sharply questioning the decision-making process, saying there are 'no monopolies', and demanded convening an urgent meeting of the Congress Working Committee for a 'dialogue'.
'If Mamata Banerjee doesn't want, then violence cannot be stopped.'
With two years to go before West Bengal elects its next government, the BJP's internal objective is to scale down the Trinamool Congress tally from 211 to 45 seats. This amounts to an annihilation of the TMC while enabling the BJP to win a record 250 seats in the 295-member legislature, reports Radhika Ramaseshan
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 BJP will get the lion's share of the Opposition vote. I would give the Congress-Left around 15 per cent.'
The organisation established its electoral presence post-Independence in states such as Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Assam, with West Bengal being its main stronghold, but eight decades down the line, the party, now limited to just some pockets of the country, has no MP or MLA in its kitty.
The Assam government announced a compensation of Rs 5 lakh and a job for the next of the kin of the deceased.
Former Union minister GK Vasan's decision to revolt and float a separate outfit in Tamil Nadu serves as a deadly blow to the Grand Old Party, which is already struggling, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Ahead of VK Sasikala's return to Tamil Nadu on February 8, there are some important questions facing her. One, does she carry electoral weight more now than her brainchild AMMK had in the 2019 LS polls? Two, can she retain or build upon the five per cent vote-share from that time? And finally, is there space for Sasikala to retrieve, first within the AIADMK and then across the state, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
The BJP doesn't want to focus entirely on an anti-Mamata campaign.
The fact remains that in the present-day Tamil Nadu, GenX and GenY voters, born and/or growing up after the end of 'Kamaraj rule' in the '60s and 'MGR rule', respectively, constitute an absolute majority of the electorate. If they still vote for a Rajini or Kamal, in preference to the established 'Dravidian voters', it is despite the MGR imagery, not because of it, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Polling will be held in all 13 seats in Punjab and an equal number of seats in Uttar Pradesh, nine in West Bengal, eight seats each in Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, four in Himachal Pradesh, three in Jharkhand and the lone seat Chandigarh.
The saffron party is assured of victory in eight of the ten seats in UP going by its dominant numbers in the state assembly.
Assembly elections are due in the summer of 2016 in five places: Assam, West Bengal in the east and Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry in the south
Over two dozen Muslims have been elected to the Lok Sabha. This shows that all is not lost for India's Muslims, suggests Mohammad Sajjad.
'It may take the AIADMK much more convincing than already, not only to try and bring around even the one-time Muslim voters of the party. 'More importantly, the party leadership may find it even more difficult to convince traditional party voters and cadres, who had admired Jaya's nonchalance to the party and leader ruling the Centre,' says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Mayawati was outmanoeuvred by the BJP in the race for the Rajya Sabha in Uttar Pradesh just days after she helped the Samajwadi Party snatch two Lok Sbaha seats from the saffron party in bypolls.
'People residing in the enclaves have led completely isolated lives. They are stateless, have no official identity proof.' 'It is significant that Modi, Banerjee, Sarkar and Gogoi, despite having different political ideologies, are walking in tandem for the cause of the people residing in the enclaves.' 'If the LBA betters the economy of India and Bangladesh, there will be less turmoil in both these countries.'
