Around 62 per cent newly-elected legislators have criminal cases against them in Kerala, while 32 per cent in West Bengal face serious charges including murder and crime against women, a report said on Friday.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for 'spreading lies and canards' against the Trinamool Congress government, and said voters, this time, would witness 'Didi versus BJP' fight in all 294 constituencies of the poll-bound state.
The Congress leaders are among those invited by the prime minister to the ceremony.
The cycle of violence resulting from the increasing criminalisation of politics cannot stop, will not stop, unless there is a wider political consensus against relying on criminal mafias for electoral purposes, argues Virendra Kapoor.
Hours after West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took a tough stance and ordered the hunting down of all suspects of the Birbhum carnage including her party colleagues, the police on Thursday arrested a local Trinamool Congress boss Anarul Hossain from near a hotel in the pilgrimage town of Tarapith.
The decision has been taken to check the spread of coronavirus, the sources said.
Of the 294 candidates declared with serious criminal cases, 76 were from the TMC, 52 from the BJP, 47 from the CPI-M and 31 from the Congress.
Noting that Goddess Durga was worshipped as a symbol of 'Shakti' (strength), Modi said his government was consistently working for the empowerment of women.
The first phase of the crucial panchayat polls in West Bengal will begin on Thursday even as the ruling Trinamool Congress kept up its attack against the State E1lection Commission.
In the over 20-page report, the central probe agency has also stated that the seven persons whose charred bodies were recovered from inside one of the burnt houses in Bogtui village, were "assaulted before being burnt alive".
Banerjee had on Tuesday confirmed her presence at the ceremony to be held on May 30.
A woman who had suffered burns in the petrol bomb attack in Bogtui village in Birbhum district last week died in a hospital on Monday, raising the toll to nine, a police officer said.
A former model who was one of the accused in a gangster's murder in an alleged fake police encounter in Mumbai was shot dead in a hotel in Gurugram months after she was granted bail, the police said on Wednesday.
Bahujan Samaj party Member of Parliament Dhananjay Singh, who was arrested along with his wife Jagriti Singh in connection with the murder of their maid, was today allowed by a Delhi court to sign documents related to disbursement of Member of Parliament Local Area Development funds.
A division bench of justices Biswanath Somadder and A Mukherjee said the government's silence on the permission is 'astonishing and astounding'.
Abhishek Banerjee, Trinamool Congress MP and nephew of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, was questioned for about nine hours by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in New Delhi on Monday in a money laundering case linked to an alleged coal pilferage scam in the state.
In Kerala, 95 out of 135 MLAs, accounting for 70 per cent, have declared criminal cases against themselves.
A bench of Justices S K Kaul and M M Sundresh referred to the affidavit filed by the CBI Director in pursuance to the top court's earlier direction asking to apprise it about the steps to be taken to strengthen their prosecution unit, the bottlenecks, and also about conviction rate in matters probed by the agency.
Father of the girl, who was gangraped and allegedly burnt to death in Madhyamgram in West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district, said he will not return to Kolkata and has accepted Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's offer of job in police at his native place.
Bengali sub-nationalism is slowly emerging as a rallying cry ahead of the West Bengal assembly elections due next year.
Non-BJP chief ministers are retaliating. If the Centre can use its agencies to threaten, intimidate and jail its rivals, so can they. The fightback will get more intense, observes Shekhar Gupta.
Branding Trinamool Congress rebels as 'traitors' like Mir Jafar, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday took a swipe at the Bharatiya Janata Party for fielding the turncoats in the polls leaving saffron party old-timers shed tears.
A Trinamool Congress leader was stabbed to death at a market in West Bengal's South 24 Parganas district on Thursday morning, following which locals caught one of the assailants and lynched him on the spot, the police said.
Thousands of BJP workers from Kolkata and Howrah began marching towards Nabanna to protest the "worsening" law and order in the state.
The BJP's message is that the past must be reinvented as creatively as imagination allows, states Sunanda K Datta-Ray.
Bahujan Samaj Party Member of Parliament Dhananjay Singh, who was arrested along with his wife Jagriti Singh in connection with the murder of their maid, was on Friday denied bail by a Delhi court.
Yahya provides constant support to all Lashkar operations in India. Infiltration from Bangladesh is a major cause for concern.
An aide of the sixth shooter arrested in the Sidhu Moosewala murder case had conducted reconnaissance in Mumbai to draw up a strategy to kill actor Salman Khan at the behest of gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, Punjab Police chief Gaurav Yadav said on Sunday.
A jailed undertrial from West Bengal was found in possession of maps related to Rajpath and Rashtrapati Bhawan.
'The BJP will get the lion's share of the Opposition vote. I would give the Congress-Left around 15 per cent.'
The number of rape cases in 2020 was 28,046, while it was 32,033 in 2019, the National Crime Records Bureau's 'Crime in India 2021' report showed.
The chief executive officer of an artificial intelligence start-up allegedly killed her four-year-old son at a service apartment in Goa and stuffed his body in a bag before taking it to neighbouring Karnataka in a taxi, the police said on Tuesday.
Protest continued on Sunday for the fourth consecutive day in Bihar against the attackers of a 16-year-old girl who was gang-raped and set ablaze in Kolkata in West Bengal demanding death sentence to the accused and a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into it.
The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday urged the Election Commission to declare Trinamool Congress as a 'terrorist party', upping the ante against the ruling party after political clashes in Birbhum violence left three people dead.
"The post-mortem report said it was a case of asphyxia due to ante-mortem hanging and suicidal in nature," the SP said.
BJP workers staged a protest in front of Nimta police station and burnt tyres on M B Road, even as the TMC claimed that its activists were not involved in any attack and she might have died due to age-related ailments.
In yet another deadly attack on Indians and Indian-Americans in the United States in recent months, a 34-year-old trained classical dancer from India and a student of Washington University, was shot dead in St Louis, Missouri.
'If Mamata Banerjee doesn't want, then violence cannot be stopped.'
'Laluji is like my father and I am like his son.'
Even as the BJP makes inroads into previously unfamiliar territories in eastern India, the party will have to be wary of losing out elsewhere, says Amulya Ganguli.
