Why did such a 'socially conscientious' people adapt to cash-for-votes and the like, as fish to water? N Sathiya Moorthy offers an explanation.
The 2015 RK Nagar bypoll, in which Jayalalithaa was elected by a huge margin of 1.5 lakh votes, had witnessed a record 75% turnout
The going is not going to be easy for the DMK and its allies in Elections 2024. Despite the seats sweepstake in the 2021 assembly polls, the vote-share difference of 5.6% (DMK's 45.38% versus AIADMK-BJP's 39.72%) is not insurmountable on a bad day, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
'Every Congress leader in UP and the rest of India is calling me and thanking me that finally someone spoke about this JNU gang ruling the Congress party in UP.'
The dates of general elections in 2019 and the presentation of the final Budget of the Modi government are so far removed from each other that Jaitley is not under any pressure to present a populist Budget. Instead, he could well unveil an array of schemes and proposals that he believes are necessary for the economy, even if a few of them could be unpopular, says A K Bhattacharya.
The Modi government is notoriously honest about one fact: It does not listen to economists, observes Shekhar Gupta.
Good intentions and elaborate roadmaps apart, there is an urgent need for the Tamil Nadu chief minister to come up with branded schemes like MGR's meal scheme, asserts N Sathiya Moorthy.
In an attempt to curb bogus voting and monitor the migration of voters across India, the Election Commission is planning to link the Census data of 2011 with its electoral rolls. The EC then plans to use global positioning system to automatically record the voters' migration or shifting of residence.Once the Census data is made available to the Election Commission, it will be clubbed with the electoral rolls. The GPS chip would be added to the electronic photo identity cards.
Chidambaram insists that the fiscal deficit target of 4.8 per cent of gross domestic product for the year to March 31, 2014, is a red line that will not be breached.
Chandrababu Naidu, on the other hand, points out that everyone in the party will have to work hard to consolidate their position. Vicky Nanjappa reports.
By getting the Tamil Nadu assembly to act on his very imaginative public declaration to keep petro-chemical industries out of the Cauvery delta, which has traditionally been a DMK stronghold, Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami has not only set the ball rolling for the assembly elections due a year later but also sent out a strong message to the BJP government at the Centre, which took a unilateral decision to exempt petro-complexes from environmental clearance, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
The commission issued letter of intent to ECIL and BEL -- both PSUs -- on Friday, two days after the Union Cabinet cleared its proposal to buy 16,15000 voter verifiable paper audit trail units at an estimated cost of Rs 3,173.47 crore.
The Election Commission is mulling a proposal to increase the polling hours during the upcoming Lok Sabha polls in light of a jump in the cumulative number of voters in the country and the trend of bigger turnout at recent elections.
'The people of Uttar Pradesh have already made up their mind to puncture the Samajwadi Party's cycle, kick away the Bahujan Samaj Party's elephant, and remove shadows of the already-vanished hand of the Congress.'
Seeking to allay citizenship concerns of a large number of people, government sources said on Thursday that one can prove Indian nationality by submitting any document related to his date of birth and its place, and there will be "absolutely no compulsion" to submit any document by his parents during any such exercise. An explainer shared by official sources said no document will be required for anybody's pre-1971 genealogy as such a condition was specific to the NRC exercise in Assam and asserted that it will be sufficient to provide one's details of birth like date and place in any future nationwide NRC.
The social media giant promised that news and views will be checked for veracity and pejorative content will be weeded out.
AAP chief has violated of model code of conduct, claim BJP, Congress.
The AAP chief illegally declared himself as a Delhi resident, claims Congress.
It will help to control the subsidy bill.
The panchayat polls will be seen as a kind of verdict from the hinterland for Yogi Adityanath ahead of the crucial 2022 Uttar Pradesh elections.
Vaccinating 100-200 people in each session per day, monitoring them for 30 minutes after administering the shots for any adverse event and allowing only one beneficiary at a time are among the guidelines issued by the Centre for the COVID-19 inoculation drive.
The Congress surveys, at least until now, have indicated the nationalistic fervour over the Pulwama terror attack is more an effort by mainstream media outlets, like news channels and newspapers, to shape a particular narrative, when the people on the ground are still asking basic questions of livelihood, jobs and better price for farm produce.
With just 50 days to go for the polling day, the commission might get more tough.
In MP, the Congress is hoping for a comeback, while in Mizoram, the BJP looking to defeat the Congress in its last bastion in the Northeast.
'You've got to be a doer to be re-elected.' 'You don't have to be a great communicator or an orator any more because voters want to see action and development on the ground.' 'And they want a doer rather than just an orator.'
'...to come back to power because it was not doing well.'
The Tamil Nadu Toddy Movement had met both Chief Minister Palaniswami and Stalin to seek their intervention in lifting the ban on toddy-tapping and had submitted petitions, but there it remained. So the matter is being taken to the people's court.
The Election Commission of India has decided to seize both licensed and illegal weapons before the Lok Sabha election and will reject requests from political parties for change of poll dates because of festivals in Assam.
The Election Commission will dispatch a team to Gujarat to probe allegations of "bogus voters" being included in the electoral rolls. A three-member Congress party delegation including Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee chief Siddharth Patel, leader of opposition Shakti Singh Goel and general secretary in charge of Gujarat, Sidharath Reddy on Friday called on the Election Commission, complaining against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Narendra Modi government.
'This election was the first opportunity where Kashmiris told the world they do not agree with the Centre's policies and are unhappy about their disempowerment.'
The decision of its two oldest allies to walk out means that Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who is also president of the Janata Dal-United, is now the oldest BJP ally besides being the most powerful.
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.
The Election Commission's insistence on physical verification of millions of non-resident Indians wishing to get voting rights has led to delay in finalizing modalities for entry of their names in electoral rolls.
The Election Commission has decided to grant two more hours to people to cast their votes in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
There are of course, other ways to win elections including intimidation of voters, gerrymandering, fiddling electoral rolls, booth-capturing and other creative forms of rigging.
Millions voted in the United Kingdom on Thursday in the country's closest polls in decades as Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party and opposition Labour were locked in a dead heat electoral battle with migrant voters, including the Indian diaspora, expected to be the deciding factor.
Despite a massive decline in crude oil prices since 2012 -- Modi has been prime minister in six of these eight years -- petrol in Delhi has become 10 per cent costlier and diesel 97 per cent, as of July 2.
The poll watchdog faces two Heruclean tasks -- to produce over a million VVPATs in time for the 2019 elections and also iron out manufacturing tweaks in the machines which are already in use.
'The political fallout of the verdict on national politics is pregnant with incredible opportunities.' 'Post-judgment politics can change the ground rules of election campaigning in the coming decades,' says Sheela Bhatt
The ministry, under Ravi Shankar Prasad, will soon prepare a Cabinet note for bringing Aadhaar under its administrative jurisdiction.
