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.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS