BJP-Shiv Sena sweep 41 seats in Maharashtra; Congress bags 1, NCP 4

Congress candidates, including former Union minister Sushilkumar Shinde, state president Ashok Chavan and Mumbai unit chief Milind Deora, lost the polls

The BJP-Shiv Sena combine won 41 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra, while the Congress won one and NCP 4 seats. Two Union ministers and two former chief ministers tasted defeat in the election, which saw the Sharad Pawar-led NCP managing to retain its tally, while the Congress bagged just one seat, down from two it won in 2014. The last result was declared early Friday.

The BJP-Sena ruling alliance had secured 42 seats in 2014 elections. The AIMIM got its first MP from the state as its nominee Imtiaz Jaleel won from Aurangabad, defeating the Sena nominee Chandrakant Khaire. Congress candidates, including former Union minister Sushilkumar Shinde, state president Ashok Chavan and Mumbai unit chief Milind Deora, lost the polls.

Sujay Vikhe Patil defeated NCP rival Sangram Jagtap in Ahmednagar. The BJP nominee, son of Congress leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, quit the Rahul Gandhi-led party to join the BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. In Maval, sitting Shiv Sena MP Shrirang Barne defeated his NCP rival Parth Pawar, the grand nephew of former Union minister Sharad Pawar.

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In Mumbai-North, BJPs Gopal Shetty defeated Congress nominee Urmila Matondkar. In Raver, BJPs Raksha Khadse trounced her Congress rival Ulhas Patil. The 23 Lok Sabha seats BJP won are Nandurbar, Dhule, Jalgaon, Raver, Akola, Wardha, Nagpur, Bhandara-Gondiya, Gadchiroli-Chimur (ST), Nanded, Jalna, Dindori (ST), Bhiwandi, Mumbai North, Mumbai North East, Mumbai North-Central, Pune, Ahmednagar, Beed, Latur (SC), Solapur (SC), Madha and Sangli.

Maharashtra minister Girish Bapat of BJP comfortably won from Pune Lok Sabha seat against Congress candidate Mohan Joshi. The Shiv Sena won Buldhana, Ramtek (SC), Yavatmal- Washim, Hingoli, Parbhani, Nashik, Palghar, Kalyan, Thane, Mumbai North West, Mumbai South Central, Mumbai South, Maval, Shirdi (SC), Osmanabad, Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg, Kolhapur and Hatkanangale seats.

Cash, goods worth Rs 3,400 crore seized during Lok Sabha elections 2019: EC

909 posts on social media platforms were removed; 647 confirmed cases of paid news, says poll panel

After the finishing of the seventh and last period of surveying on Sunday, the Election Commission said money, medications, alcohol and valuable metals worth Rs 3,449.12 crore were seized by requirement offices since the Lok Sabha surveys were reported on March 10. This is thrice of what offices seized amid the 2014 Lok Sabha survey process. In 2014, law implementation offices made seizures worth Rs 1,206 crore, the EC’s chief general (race use) Dilip Sharma said.

Law authorization offices between March 10 and May 19 caught Rs 839.03 crore in real money, alcohol worth Rs 294.41 crore, drugs worth Rs 1,270.37 crore, valuable metals, including gold, worth Rs 986.76 crore and “complimentary gifts”, including sarees, wrist watches, went for inciting voters worth Rs 58.56 crore were seized.

EC authorities said they coordinated web based life stages, including Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, to expel a few that were found to damage the EC’s code. They said web based life stages expelled 909 posts. Facebook evacuated 650 posts, Twitter brought down 220 posts, ShareChat expelled 31, YouTube five and WhatsApp three.

Of the 650 posts brought somewhere around Facebook, 482 were political messages posted amid the “quietness period”. The “quiet period” begins 48 hours before the hour set for determination of surveying in a specific stage. The seventh period of surveying found some conclusion at 6 pm on Sunday, so the “quietness period” had started at 6 pm on Friday for this stage…

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Elections 2019: In UP, parties try to shore up their flanks before phase 2

The principal players are trying to fine tune their complex and complicated caste equations to ensure victory

Dharmendra Soni, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) coordinator of the Aligarh region, was supremely confident that the BSP’s alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP) would be more “productive” and “enduring” in 2019 than it was in 1993, when the BSP’s founder-president Kanshi Ram linked up with the SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav to jointly fight the assembly election and defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The raison d’etre was identical but Soni believed that the essence was not the same.

“The foundation of the earlier understanding was shaky, there was mutual distrust. Dalits regarded the SP’s Yadavs as land-grabbers and oppressors. The Yadavs thought of us as infra dig. The BJP exploited the cracks and took away the BSP. We now understand that the backward castes, scheduled castes and Muslims are natural allies, ‘shudras’ who were artfully divided by the upper castes to thwart a coalition. Mayawati (the BSP president) will fight for Dalits and Akhilesh Yadav (the SP head) will fight for the backward castes and together they will ensure that Muslims will be protected. See the contempt with which the BJP looks at Akhilesh. Once Akhilesh vacated the chief minister’s bungalow (in Lucknow after losing the 2017 elections), his successor (Yogi Adityanath) performed a ritual to cleanse the place because it was occupied by a backward caste person,” said Soni, who works out of Awagarh in Etah district.

To try and underscore that the Mayawati-Akhilesh re-union was not a one election partnership, Om Prakash Jatav, a BSP worker also at Awagarh, said, “The BJP has earmarked a 10 percent quota for the upper castes but after the elections, the BSP and SP will launch an agitation to demand a 52 percent reservation slot for the backward castes and Dalits, equivalent to our population, and a caste census.”

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Lok Sabha 1st phase candidates: 32% crorepatis, 17% facing criminal charges

Nearly half of all candidates have declared they have a graduate degree or above, while 1.5% have declared they are just literate, and 5.2% that they are illiterate

Of the candidates contesting the first phase of Lok Sabha elections, 213 (17%) have declared they are facing criminal cases, of which 146 (12%) face serious criminal charges, as per an analysis of candidates’ affidavits by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR).

About a third (32%) or 401 of 1,266 candidates whose affidavits were studied have declared assets worth Rs 1 crore or more. Among the major parties, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) are notable for having all (25 from TDP and 17 from TRS) ‘crorepati’ candidates.

Nearly half of all candidates have declared they have a graduate degree or above, while 1.5% have declared they are just literate, and 5.2% that they are illiterate. About a third of candidates are aged between 25 and 40 years, while more than half are between 41 and 60 years. The first phase of polling began on April 11, 2019. ADR studied the affidavits of 1,266 of the 1,279 candidates who are contesting during this phase. Affidavits of 13 candidates were not analysed as they were not properly scanned or were incomplete.

Candidates filing nomination papers for contesting an election have to submit an affidavit (Form 26) furnishing personal details that include details of income and assets, with PAN and income tax return as proof. A candidate also has to list the details of any criminal cases he or she has been charged with. If a candidate is found to have filed a false affidavit, he or she can be imprisoned for up to six months and/or made to pay a fine.

The affidavits filed by the candidates contesting the 17th Lok Sabha elections are publicly available at the Election Commission’s website. Of the 146 candidates facing serious criminal charges, 12 have declared they have been convicted in the past. Persons convicted are debarred from contesting elections for six years from the date of conviction, but only if they have been sentenced to imprisonment of two years or more.

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Better jobs to farm distress: Key issues in India’s general elections

Here are the main issues in the election, votes in which will be counted on May 23

India will hold general elections in seven phases starting from Thursday, with about 900 million voters eligible to participate in the world’s biggest democratic exercise.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling alliance will win a thin majority, opinion polls show, with its focus on national security appearing to trump concerns over jobs and farm prices.

Here are the main issues in the election, votes in which will be counted on May 23.

Jobs : With more than half the population of 1.3 billion younger than 25 and millions joining the workforce every year, the lack of jobs created during Modi’s term is a major issue. Better job opportunities are voters’ top priority, a survey of more than 270,000 people by electoral watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms has shown. Unemployment rose to 7.2 percent in February, its highest since September 2016, data from private thinktank the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy shows.

A government report leaked to the Business Standard newspaper said unemployment in the year ending June 2018 rose to 6.1 percent, its highest in at least 45 years. The election manifesto of the main opposition Congress party promised a slew of measures to try and halve unemployment.

Muscular Nationalism : Modi’s national security record was spotlighted by an aerial clash with arch foe Pakistan, triggered by a February suicide attack in disputed Kashmir that killed 40 Indian paratroopers and was claimed by an Islamist militant group based in the neighbour.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) says the decision to send warplanes to Pakistan to bomb a purported training camp, in India’s first such aerial strike since 1971, is proof of Modi’s muscular stance against what New Delhi calls Islamabad’s backing for militants. Prime Minister Imran Khan has said no militant group will be allowed to operate from Pakistan’s soil for attacks abroad…

Click Here: Lok Sabha Elections 2019