Local elections were held in three Indian states yesterday amid some Maoist violence aimed at disrupting a vote seen as a key test of the ruling Congress party’s popularity since its landslide national win in May.
The polls in Maharashtra, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh could also help dictate the pace and scope of reform measures such as disinvestment in state-run firms and reviving economic growth.
Analysts say a good performance in the state polls could convince Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the government can tackle key reforms and a new tax code without any electoral cost. Maoists and police exchanged fire near a polling booth in the forested, rebel stronghold of Gadchiroli in Maharashtra state where they killed 17 police last week.
Navy, air force and paramilitary forces guarded the financial hub of Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra, which was attacked by Islamist gunmen last year, killing 166 people.
“Polling is going on peacefully all over the state except for this one incident,” A.N. Roy, a top police officer overseeing election security in Maharashtra told NDTV news channel, referring to the Maoist attack.
Singh has called the Maoists one of the gravest threats to India’s security and last week chaired a meeting of the Cabinet to plan a big strike.
A weak and divided Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main opposition Hindu nationalist party, may help the Congress retain most of the 90 seats in northern Haryana and 60 seats in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.
But in prosperous Maharashtra, where the Congress and its Nationalist Congress Party ally are battling a combination of the BJP and the hardline Hindu party Shiv Sena for 288 seats, an anti-incumbency sentiment may make the race tougher.
The breakaway faction of Shiv Sena, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, could also split the vote, perhaps leading to a hung assembly and delaying projects such as plans to upgrade Mumbai’s crumbling infrastructure.
Earlier, Maoists blew up communication towers, rail tracks and a village council office in eastern India to protest an expected government crackdown on their activities, officials said yesterday.
The overnight attacks in Bihar and Jharkhand states stranded trains for hours, and buses stayed off roads in rebel-controlled areas, but no one was reported hurt.
The rebels launched their two-day protest on Monday, also in the states of Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Orissa.
The rebels, who say that they are inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), have been fighting for more than three decades in several Indian states, demanding land and jobs for agricultural laborers and the poor.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
RSS