Wednesday, July 24th, 2019

Biju Janata Dal (BJD) candidate Sabitri Agarwal had opened up a lead of 11,791 votes over the BJP’s Bijoy Mohapatra in Odisha’s Patkura assembly constituency on Wednesday, an election official said, as votes from the July 20 poll were counted in Kendrapara district. The count so far At the end of the seventh round, Agarwal had 42,037 votes against 30,246 for Mohapatra. Congress nominee Jayanta Kumar Mohanty was a distant third with 1,107 votes. Counting was under way at Kendrapara Autonomous College behind a three-tier security cordon, and the wholeRead More

Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has been accused by Goa Forward Party (GFP) president Vijai Sardesai of “back-stabbing” his coalition partners, after Sawant removed Sardesai and two other GFP legislators from the state cabinet. In an interview in Panaji on Tuesday, the former deputy chief minister also asked why 10 Congress MLAs had been brought into the BJP when the government faced no threat. The cabinet reshuffle The 10 Congress legislators moved to the BJP earlier this month. Sawant then reorganised his ministry, dropping three ministers from the GFP, which wasRead More

An analysis of the Karnataka crisis argues that the Congress was never fully committed to saving its coalition with the JD(S), pointing to a remark by Congress Legislature Party leader Siddaramaiah captured by the Assembly microphones. At around 10pm, as coalition MLAs pressed for one more day before the trust vote and BJP members demanded it that night, a visibly irritated Siddaramaiah was heard saying, “ask him to resign and go”. The argument Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy and his deputy G Parameshwara were not in the House at the time.Read More

The Trinamool Congress on Wednesday accused the government of pushing bills through Parliament without proper scrutiny, and said a united opposition would not allow itself to be “steamrolled”. O’Brien’s charge TMC MP and national spokesperson Derek O’Brien alleged that the government had used its “brute majority” in the Lok Sabha to force through what he called a “faulty RTI Bill”. In a tweet, he said three bills had been listed for passage in the Rajya Sabha that day, none of them scrutinised, and asked whether the opposition was expected toRead More

Two independent MLAs from Karnataka, R Shankar and H Nagesh, on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to let them withdraw their petition seeking a direction to Assembly Speaker K R Ramesh Kumar to hold a floor test “forthwith” on the H D Kumaraswamy government’s trust motion. In court Their counsel told a bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, and also comprising Justices Aniruddha Bose and Deepak Gupta, that the plea was no longer needed because of recent developments: the floor test had been held on Tuesday and the Congress-JD(S)Read More