Lok Sabha Election 2024
Nitish Kumar prepares for the battle of Delhi
Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is preparing to enter the race for 2024 Lok Sabha. Sources close to Nitish Kumar said that he has already made his intentions clear to his partymen as well as his allies. Though a consensus is yet to emerge among opposition parties on his name, the Bihar chief minister has started preparing for the battle. He has been frequenting and nurturing his old parliamentary constituency Nalanda, from where he would seek to enter parliament in 2024. The chief minister has also decided, JD(U) insiders say, to spend more time in Delhi for wider national visibility and connect. He would in the coming months be meeting with leaders of the opposition parties to try and unite them against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling NDA. With Nitish making his national ambition clear, the race for the post of Prime Minister is getting increasingly crowded. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal have already thrown their hats in the ring. Mamata had recently tried to form a non-Congress opposition front against the BJP-led NDA. Her efforts came to naught with NCP chief Sharad Pawar and Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray telling her that it was not possible to mount a meaningful challenge to the ruling alliance without the Congress. Kejriwal, too, has not been a big hit among the opposition leaders. Nitish, on the other hand, already has the Congress and the Left parties as his allies in Bihar. These two parties would have a big say in deciding the opposition’s face in the next Lok Sabha election, say JD(U) leaders.
Breaking New Ground
PCI bares its fangs under a new chairperson
Justice Ranjana Desai has started her new job as the chairperson of the Press Council of India with a bang. In a first, the PCI has ordered a government entity to pay compensation for the injury caused by its action. The council directed the Chandigarh administration last week to pay Rs 20,000 each to two journalists who were seriously injured by the water cannon fired on them while they were covering an opposition march to Punjab chief minister’s residence in July 2019. The journalists were standing on top of a wall to get a better view of the marchers and the water cannon threw them off it causing the injury. The council had in the past directed private entities to give financial compensation. Most prominent among them is the Tata group, which was ordered to pay a compensation of Rs 30 lakh to the journalists who were beaten up in front of Bombay House while covering the Tata-Cyrus Mistry corporate tussle. That was the first time the PCI got a private company to pay compensation to an aggrieved party. The PCI has so far only been censuring those found to have committed a wrong. And this is what it did in yet another order last week. It censured Rajkot Collector Remya Mohan for trying to bribe eight journalists to get good coverage for the 2020 Republic Day function. One of the journalists refused to accept the bribe and published a report in his newspaper that cheques for Rs 50,000 each were offered to eight journalists.
Jharkhand Political Crisis
Pande throws a spanner in Hemant’s works
Congress general secretary in-charge of Jharkhand Avinash Pande has ruffled CM Hemant Soren’s feathers. The chief minister is in the middle of a struggle to save himself as well as his government from getting dislodged. The day Hemant drove all MLAs of the alliance for a picnic at Khunti, Pande reached Ranchi and called a meeting of Congress MLAs late evening. He pulled up the MLAs for packing up and leaving capital without consulting the party leadership. He later announced that the Congress MLAs will leave the city only on the instruction of top Congress leadership. The news was published prominently in all local newspapers. This upset the chief minister who felt that Pande’s statement indicated that there were fissures in the ruling alliance while he felt there were none.