National News

While Rahul Gandhi was widely feted on Tuesday for the Congress win in the Firozabad Lok Sabha seat by-poll, what came as a rude jolt to the party leadership was that the AICC general secretary had failed to deliver in the high-stakes Bundelkhand region, despite a high-voltage campaign for 'development'.

While the recent political crisis in Karnataka, that threatened to tear apart the first BJP government in the south, was being played out, senior Karnataka BJP leader and current Speaker in the Legislative Assembly Jagadish Shettar is said to have quipped in private, "What I did not get when I wanted it is now seeking me out".

At A time when the BJP is grappling with many internal problems, not the least of which is the struggle to find a new party president, Tuesday's by-poll results have come as a further blow.

The Maharashtra Legislative Assembly saw the Shiv Sena and its rival— the Raj Thackeray led MNS- team up to seek action against Samajwadi Party MLA Abu Azmi for his alleged remarks against Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray.

By-poll results in seven states, in as much as they can be seen as a barometer of the national mood, indicate that goodwill for the Congress party and its allies — five months after they won the Lok Sabha polls — remains high.

National parties want relentlessly to crush smaller and regional parties. They want to virtually eat them up in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra". That was Lalu Prasad Yadav at the RJD's national executive meet in Patna on November 4.

The World Economic Forum has perhaps for the first time completely blacked out the Opposition from the India Economic Summit, whose 25th edition concluded on Tuesday.

The Left's miserable electoral run continued as the Trinamool Congress, surging ahead with a vote-share larger than it had in the Lok Sabha polls, handed another humiliating defeat to Left Front major CPM which drew a blank in the bypolls in West Bengal.

The Maharashtra legislature witnessed unprecedented chaos and minor violence on the first day of its new assembly after MLAs belonging to Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) roughed up the Samajwadi Party's Abu Azmi for taking his oath in Hindi despite Thackeray's diktat that all state MLAs should be sworn-in only in Marathi.

Undeterred by the income tax raid, interrogation by its sleuths, summons by the enforcement directorate in connection with the FIR filed against him and eight others under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, former chief minister Madhu Koda, who was discharged from hospital on Sunday, has put up five Independent candidates for the forthcoming Assembly polls in Jharkhand.

Giving a shot in the arm to Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, four of the six MLAs of Kuldeep Bishnoi-led Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) today joined the Congress whose strength went up to 44, two short of a majority on its own in the 90-member state Assembly.

As legislators of Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) clashed with Samajwadi Party MLA Abu Azmi on the first day of the state Assembly session on Monday, President Pratibha Patil's son and first-time MLA from Amravati, Rajendra Shekhawat, said it was necessary for migrants to integrate with local customs and traditions but regretted the violence in the state Assembly.

Former Hurriyat chairman Prof Abdul Gani Bhat on Monday said that his proposal to set up an alliance between Kashmir's separatists and mainstream political parties to move towards a resolution is supported by Pakistan.

It is just a small municipal election but the hype and internal rivalry within political parties, and the money involved, has made it big.

PICK OF THE WEEK * The Bellary show Before a resolution was announced on Sunday, the Karnataka BJP crisis billowed through the week, shifting its locale from Bengaluru to New Delhi, searching for the formula that could assuage the rich and powerful Reddy brothers and also be palatable to the BJP's first chief minister in the south, BS Yeddyurappa.

The Dalai Lama, who arrived here on Sunday to a rousing welcome, took a swipe at Beijing for objecting to his visit to Arunachal Pradesh and said he was "surprised" over Chinese claims on Tawang.

The Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party have clinched the power-sharing deal in Maharashtra and formed a coalition government for the third successive term, after haggling over the power-sharing formula for 16 days.

The newly constituted Congress-NCP government will on a priority basis expedite the development of Mumbai as an international finance centre and also focus on the time bound implementation of over Rs 50,000 crore infrastructure projects in Mumbai, load-shedding free Maharashtra in three years and regaining the past glory.

Retired civil servant Gopi Arora, 76, who wielded enormous clout as special secretary in Rajiv Gandhi's PMO, passed away here on Thursday.