- Friday, April 19, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
Here are some news related to Indian politics for Thursday, August 11, 2022:
Anubrata Mandal, a senior and influential leader of the Trinamool Congress, a major opposition party in India, was on Thursday arrested by the elite investigative body Central Bureau of Investigation in a cattle-smuggling case after he failed to appear for questioning two times in three days. The officials, escorted by a huge contingent of central armed forces personnel, reached the residence of the TMC leader in Bolpur in Birbhum district of the state of West Bengal. He was later produced before a court. The TMC is led by Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of Bengal and major challenger of prime minister Narendra Modi.
Tejashwi Yadav, the deputy chief minister of Bihar, on Thursday endorsed the state’s chief minister Nitish Kumar for the post of the prime minister in 2024. Yadav, who leads the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), said his party’s decision to forge an alliance with Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) was “spontaneous and on the spot”, NDTV reported. The 32-year-old politician, who was Kumar’s deputy between 2015 and 2017 when the latter dumped the Grand Alliance to join hands with the BJP, said Kumar has all kind of experience.
The Shiv Sena, which recently got split over an internal trouble, on Thursday claimed Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has created a storm by severing ties with the BJP and this storm could pose a challenge to the saffron party in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls if it intensifies into a cyclone. An editorial in the Sena’s mouthpiece ‘Saamana’ lavished praise on Kumar, saying the BJP tried to break his party Janata Dal (United), but he stung back and turned the tables by severing ties with the BJP. The Marathi daily also targeted Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde, who revolted against the Sena leadership in June and succeeded in toppling the coalition government of Uddhav Thackeray, saying he “bent the knee” before Delhi. He (Shinde) should understand that Kumar showed he can survive without it, the editorial said.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has claimed there seems to be something wrong with the Narendra Modi government’s finances the way it is “strongly opposing” free facilities for people. Hitting out at the central government, Kejriwal, an Aam Aadmi Party leader, on Thursday claimed that the government waived Rs 10 lakh crore (£103 billion) of loans and Rs 5 lakh crore (£51.4 billion) of taxes of super rich people and their companies and said it was taxing the poor when he buys wheat and rice from the market.
A day after the central leadership of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) effected key changes in the key northern state of Uttar Pradesh, chief minister Yogi Adityanath met the party’s national president JP Nadda in New Delhi on Thursday. Under Nadda’s guidance, the state government has been working relentlessly for everyone’s welfare with a sense of service, Adityanath tweeted after the meeting, PTI reported. On Wednesday (10), Adityanath had met vice president Jagdeep Dhankhar, who took oath on Thursday, along with president Droupadi Murmu. Sunil Bansal, who was one of the BJP’s key election managers and the party’s Uttar Pradesh general secretary (organisation), was on Wednesday appointed as its national general secretary and also made in-charge of three Opposition-ruled states — West Bengal, Odisha and Telangana — in the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
A day after Nitish Kumar, who dumped the BJP to forge alliance with secular parties to form a new government in Bihar, said the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government needs to “worry” about the next Lok Sabha polls in 2024, central minister Giriraj Singh, who belongs to Bihar, tweeted a video showing a dog trying to fight two lions and captioned it “Challenge 2024”. The video uploaded by the senior BJP leader was seen as a veiled dig at Kumar.
India’s National Commission for Women (NCW) has urged Om Birla, the speaker of the Lok Sabha or Lower House of the Indian parliament, to take action against Andhra Pradesh’s Hindupur parliamentarian Gorantla Madhav after receiving a complaint of alleged sexual harassment against him, Press Trust of India reported. According to the complaint, the member of the parliament from the YSR Congress party is alleged to have engaged in an explicit video call without the victim’s consent, the panel said. The content of the video is alleged to be indecent, obscene and undignified, the NCW said in a statement.
