POLITICS

Special strategy to celebrate Modi’s birthday on Sept 17

The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is all set to celebrate the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 73^rd birthday on September 17. The party has reportedly devised a special strategy for the occasion and is gearing up in full swing for the grand celebration. On this day, BJP will organize a nationwide ‘Service over Organization’ program. Apart from this, the Deendayal Upadhyay's Jayanti (September 25) and Lal Bahadur Shastri Jayanti on October 2 will also be celebrated under the 'Seva Pakhwara'. PM Modi, born on September 17, 1950, in Gujarat's Vadnagar, a small and nondescript town in the Mehsana district of North Gujarat.

Assembly bypolls result: The best and the worst for the BJP

The Assembly bypoll results are a mixed bag for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In Tripura, when it won both the Assembly seats including Boxanagar seat, a Muslim dominated constituency, in Kerala’s Puthuppally segment, it poured men and machinery but ended up with the worst show. Boxanagar is a CPM stronghold segment where the Muslim candidate of the BJP, Tafajjal Hossain won, the first ever Muslim MLA for the BJP in Tripura. The seat has around 66% minority voters. He won the election  by 30,237 votes. Hossain got 34,146 votes, while his nearest rival Mizan Hossain of the CPI(M) got 3,909 votes only. In contrast, the result of the Puthuppally Assembly bypoll is a severe jolt for the Kerala BJP. Its candidate G Lijin Lal managed to get only 5.02% of the polled votes, against the 61.38% vote share of the winner. The party had gone all out for the bypoll, forming a 17-member group under the leadership of the party’s Kerala incharge, Prakash Javadekar.