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The upcoming Assembly elections to five states, three of which are in the South, will go a long way in shaping most regional and national parties' political future. The polls are crucial for the three national parties, the Congress, BJP, and the left and the regional parties. The five states in the South send 129 members to Parliament. By citing the Puducherry example, the Congress opponents want to show ahead of the polls that the Congress would not hold its MLAs even if they are voted for. The Congress has lost its only state in the South – Puducherry last month.

New Delhi: Shuttlers Varun Kapur and Malvika Bansod chalked out hard-fought victories to win the men and women's titles at the Uganda International in Kampala.

New Delhi: Manika Batra and Harmeet Desai opened their campaign on a winning note recording straight-set victories in their respective qualifying round-2 matches at the World Table Tennis (WTT) Contender Doha on Monday.

New Delhi: Unbeaten professional pugilist Vijender Singh will return to the ring on March 19 and the bout will be in Vegas-style boxing on the Ship in Goa.

The government has, for decades, been attempting to impose constraints upon independent media. At the same time, the right to freedom of speech has always been subjected to the individual vagaries of administrators and judges while interpreting how the limitations described in the Constitution should actually be prescribed.

It would be wrong to construe that the G-8 meeting in Jammu was a summit of the Congress rebels or show of strength by the Congress dissidents or an exercise to grand old party. Congress has witnessed many splits in the past but this meeting could at best be described as an attempt to find their roots by some frustrated and disgruntled Congressmen.

The CBI investigations into a possible connection of Rujira Naroola Banerjee, wife of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew and Trinamool Party’s Lok Sabha member Abhishek Banerjee, with the ongoing coal mining scandal in the state and money trail may have more to do with the growing pre-poll feud between TMC and BJP in the state than with any substance. It may also be meant to divert the public attention from CBI’s failure to apprehend main suspects in the case, including Anup Majhi alias Lala and Vinay Mishra. Vinay Mishra is the TMC youth wing’s general secretary. The investigating agency had issued a look-out notice against both Majhi and Mishra. Majhi was recently interrogated by CBI.

Trouble is dogging the beleaguered Nepal Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli at every step. Two factions of his Nepal Communist Party (NCP), one led by himself and the other by his arch rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias ‘Prachanda’ are on the verge of a formal split. It is not a question of ‘whether’ but ‘when’. In the Nepali Parliament, his majority is in doubt – a fact he knows himself. So, he took the easy way out by asking the country’s obliging president Vidya Devi Bhandari to dissolve the parliament on December 20 last year and call for fresh elections on April 30 and May 10 this year.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has finally laid bare his grand programme of dismantling the central public sector in the country which laid the foundation of the core sector industries i soon after the Indian planning started after independence. Last week in his address on disinvestment of assets at a webinar attended by the senior government officials, PM categorically said that PSEs should not be run because they were started many years ago or they were someone's pet project.

In all elections, every contestant wants to win. The desire is all the greater for the BJP in West Bengal because it has not only been an outsider in the state with a minimal social and political presence till now, but also politically untouchable, even disreputable, because of its cow belt background. The BJP is all the more determined, therefore, to outsmart its longstanding detractors in West Bengal.