D-day for Uttarakhand today

Uttarakhand Elections 2017 - Only N D Tiwari has given a five-year-long stable government in to Uttarakhad. After Tiwari’s exit, political instability kept haunting the hill state as chief ministers were changed repeatedly by both Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress.

And last year, the instability reached its peak when the Harish Rawat government was dismissed and later reinstated.

On Wednesday, the state will see its Assembly elections after a year-long political instability, making it a day of reckoning. The polling will be held for 69 constituencies after the election for the lone Karanprayag seat was countermanded following the death of Kuldip Singh Kanwasi, a BSP candidate. The polling in Karanprayag will be held on March 9. “Preparations for the polling have already been made,” said an Election Commission official.

The ruling Congress is facing a stiff challenge from BJP in almost all the seats.

In more than 20 seats, the contest is likely to be very close. Even a difference of 100 votes can change dimensions, especially in Assembly seats such as Vikasnagar, Dehradun Cantt, Narendra nagar, Doiwala and Ranikhet, claimed political experts. But hours before the polling, a purported sting operation accusing Rawat of bribing Dan Singh Bhandari, a former BJP MLA, created flutter in the political circles of Uttarakhand.(Read More)

UP poll: No love lost between political rivals on Valentine's Day

UP elections 2017 - Even as the Valentine's Day falls today, there is apparently no love lost between the top leaders of major political parties as they crisscross poll bound Uttar Pradesh addressing public meetings and unleashing vitriolic attack on opponents.

The canvassing for the second phase of polling in 67 assembly constituencies across 11 largely western UP districts had come to an end on Monday evening with voting scheduled for Wednesday. The districts going to polls on February 15 include Saharanpur, Bijnore, Moradabad, Rampur, Sambhal, Bareilly, Amroha, Pilibhit, Kheri, Shahjahanpur and Badaun.

The politicking for the phase II polling nonetheless witnessed top mascots of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Congress upping the ante to corner their opponents with a view to consolidating their core vote banks.

Senior political leaders who addressed rallies on Monday across UP, included Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP President Amit Shah, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, BSP President Mayawati, SP President and UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and SP patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav.

While, Modi and Rahul addressed well attended public meetings in Kheri, Mayawati and Akhilesh were the star campaigners and speakers at election rallies in Etawah and Badaun districts respectively.(Read More)

UP polls 2017: More women losing deposits, fewer winning elections

UP elections 2017 - Poor, populous Uttar Pradesh (UP) was the first Indian state to have a female chief minister–Sucheta Kriplani from 1963 to 1967–but this pioneering effort has not improved prospects for women in elections.

As voter turnout has risen, more competitors have stood against women candidates, fewer women have won and a growing number have lost their deposits, according to an IndiaSpend and Swaniti Initiative analysis of electoral data of the last three state elections in UP since 2002.


The only exception was for the seats reserved for scheduled caste (SC) candidates. The proportion of women winning SC seats was more than double that of those winning general seats.

All this happened over a period when women in India’s most populous state became healthier and better educated, reinforcing the point that there is no correlation between these indicators and better political representation of women.
States with the worst sex ratios have more women members of legislative assemblies (MLAs), as IndiaSpend reported in September 2015.

Roughly over the same period of our study, female literacy in UP grew from 42.2% in 2001 to 59.3% in 2011, and the sex ratio improved from 898 to 908, according to census data compiled by the NITI Aayog. (Read More)

Sasikala convicted in DA case: How a Poes Garden raid did her in

Over the past week or so, one of the staunch supporters of VK Sasikala claim to form a government in Tamil Nadu was BJP leader Subramanian Swamy. He was seen openly supporting her in TV channels and even met the governor at Chennai. Ironically then, the final blow that dashed Sasikala's hopes of occupying the chief minister's chair came from a bullet fired by Swamy two decades ago.

In fact, while Swamy's complaint named only Jayalalithaa, a raid of Poes garden and evidences gathered there and other locations in 1996-97, brought in Sasikala, her nephew VN Sudhakaran and her sister in law J Elavarasi as accused no 2, 3 and 4 in what came to be known as the disproportionate assets (DA) case.

The trial court judgment by Justice John Michael Cunha in September 2014, records that the criminal law was set in motion against former Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa by Subramanian Swamy, the then president of Janata Dal.

He lodged a complaint on June 14, 1996 alleging that, subsequent to the assumption of the public office of the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa acquired properties and earned income disproportionate to her known source of income. The complaint came a month after the AIADMK was condemned to its worst defeat till date in the Assembly elections. Jayalalithaa herself lost in Barugur. Her party was reduced to four seats from 164, five years earlier.(Read More)

PM Modi's letter defending note ban gets delivered in every UP household

Election 2017- Prime Minister Narendra Modi has written a letter addressing voters in Uttar Pradesh saying that his government's surprise demonetisation measure was necessary to root out corruption and prevent terrorism, reported The Economic Times on Tuesday.

According to the report, over 1,600 motorcycle-borne activists have been tasked with the duty of delivering the prime minister's letter to 2,75,000 households every day.

The move comes at a time when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) might not be fairing as well in Uttar Pradesh as the party had initially thought. As reported earlier, there is a noticeable defensiveness among BJP voters and supporters this time around regarding the note ban and every time the questions related to the issue crop up. Further, the BJP’s local offices, which in 2014 brimmed with people prematurely celebrating Narendra Modi’s victory before counting, have been muted. (Read more)

A young party official of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh provenance in Rampur, who had his nose to the grindstone when the Lok Sabha polls were underway, told Business Standard that he “lost interest” this time. “I have nothing to say to our voters when they pose uncomfortable questions on demonetisation. I am packing my bags and taking a vacation in my village,” he said. The official’s main worry was that demonetisation had begun to "chip away" at Prime Minister Modi’s image. "Modiji has invested much personal and political capital in it but people ask me, does he not understand our hardships? Why did he make us suffer?" he added. (Read More)