A turnout of 50 percent to 90 percent was recorded in three Lok Sabha and 29 assembly constituencies spread across 13 states during by-elections on Saturday, with INLD leader Abhay Chautala, who quit the Haryana assembly in protest against the new agri laws, and Congress’ Pratibha Singh, wife of late chief minister Virbhadra Singh, among the prominent candidates in the fray.
The RSS said on Saturday that forced religious conversion should stop and those who change their faith should announce it. The Sangh also said it would welcome the passing of any anti-conversion bill. “People who are converted have to announce that they have converted. There are people who get converted and do not disclose that they have converted. They take double benefits,” RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale said at a press conference.
PM Narendra Modi and BJP will grow stronger as a political force as long as Congress remains indecisive and displays a lack of seriousness, said West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee in Goa on Saturday. The TMC supremo said Congress had squandered several opportunities to take on BJP, because of which the country is suffering.
Less than a month after declaring he aimed to become Rajasthan CM for the fourth time, Ashok Gehlot on Saturday sought to put party before personal ambition by saying the only goal that mattered was for Congress to form the government again in 2023.
Rejecting reports of back-end talks with Congress, former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh said on Saturday that the time for rapprochement was over.
Six rebel BSP MLAs and one sitting legislator from BJP formally joined Samajwadi Party in Lucknow on Saturday. After inducting the seven MLAs into the party fold, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav said BJP should now change its slogan from ‘Mera parivar BJP parivar’ to ‘mera parivar bhaagta parivar’.
Observing that people belonging to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes continue to “face insurmountable hurdles in accessing justice from the stage of filing the complaint to the conclusion of the trial”, the Supreme Court on Friday said they must be made an active stakeholder in criminal proceedings and it is mandatory to keep victims of offences under the SC/ST Act informed about the court proceedings against accused and be allowed to be heard.
A metropolitan court on Saturday issued a non-bailable warrant against IPS officer Param Bir Singh and two other accused — Vinay Singh and Chhota Shakeel aide Riyaz Bhatti — in a case of alleged extortion where the accused threatened a hotelier and extorted money, reports Ahmed Ali. This is the second non-bailable warrant against the officer.
In what shows that employment demand under MGNREGS will be high like last year, belying the government’s expectations and funding, the scheme has already exhausted the budget approved for the current financial year with five more months to go.
Rejecting the bail plea of a person accused of raping his girlfriend along with other accused, the Allahabad high court has said that “having consensual sex with a major girl is not an offence, but is unethical, immoral and against established Indian norms”.
Union home minister Amit Shah on Saturday accused Congress of “appeasement politics”, claiming that when he visited Uttarakhand earlier during the party’s tenure, “people had permission to block a national highway fornamaz”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Saturday, where Modi invited the head of the Roman Catholic Church to visit India and the two leaders discussed the future of a post-Covid world and climate change among other issues at a meeting that went on for an hour beyond the scheduled 20 minutes.
Holding it mandatory for a government authority to expeditiously deal with and communicate its decision on a representation made by a person against preventive detention, the Supreme Court on Friday invalidated an order passed by Madhya Pradesh government against a doctor after noting that no decision was taken on his representation for two months. Rejection of his plea by the Centre was also not communicated to him in jail.
Anantapur in Telugu means “blessed with many things”. It's an ironic name for a place that has come to be known for what it’s not blessed with — rainfall. This district in Andhra Pradesh has seen 18 droughts in the last 20 years (till 2020), making it a living example of creeping desertification and mass migration.
An Army officer and a jawan were killed in a mine explosion near a forward post along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir’s Rajouri district late Saturday.
The active cases stands at 1,61,555, said the Union ministry of health. The active cases account for less than 1% of total cases and is currently at 0.47%. This is the lowest since March 2020. With 13,543 recoveries being reported in the last 24 hours, India's total recoveries has reached 3,36,41,175.
People in three parliamentary seats and 30 assembly constituencies across 15 states and Union territories are voting in bypolls on Saturday. In the competitive world of Karnataka politics, these bypolls are the first major electoral test for chief minister Basavaraj Bommai, who took over from the veteran Yedduyurappa. Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot will want to win the bypolls to assert his supremacy once again
The Bombay high court on Thursday granted bail to 23-year-old Aryan Khan, son of actor Shah Rukh Khan, his friend Arbaaz Merchant and Munmun Dhamecha, a model from Madhya Pradesh, in the case of alleged seizure of drugs from a cruise liner on October 2. All of them have spent 25 days in custody.
US authorities returned about 250 antiquities to India on Thursday in a long-running investigation of a stolen art scheme. The items, worth an estimated $15 million, were handed over during a ceremony at the Indian Consulate in New York City.
