NEWS

With only 10 days to go for the “grand rally” by AICC general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in Varanasi to launch the Congress poll campaign in UP, the party is facing an exodus of key state leaders, many of whom are making a beeline for the Samajwadi Party (SP).

On Friday, the party's prominent Bundelkhand leaders and former MLAs, Gayadeen Anuragi and Vinod Chaturvedi, joined SP along with Manoj Tiwari from Mahoba.

These exits come a day after the party's former MLA and leading minority face in western UP, Imran Masood, said SP was the only option to defeat BJP in the state and that all parties should “come along with it”.

Masood also said that despite all the hard work, Priyanka was “failing to consolidate votes or get votes” in favour of the party. Masood, who was earlier with SP, was recently made AICC secretary and given charge of Delhi.

Amid talk of some more prominent leaders ditching the Congress in the next few days, the party moved into gear for next year’s Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls with meetings of not just its screening and state election committees but also the state advisory committee in Lucknow on Thursday.

According to sources, after the initial round of meetings, which was aimed at firming up an action plan for the coming days, it was decided that the party would come out with its first list of candidates by the second week of October.

The list, say sources, would feature “strong” candidates, those who stood second in the last Assembly election as well as new faces who the party reckons have a strong chance of putting up a good fight.

Delhi University on Friday released record high cutoffs for undergraduate courses as seven colleges asked for 100% marks to admit students to a total of 10 programmes. Last year, only one college, Lady Shri Ram (LSR), had released 100% cutoffs for three courses.

Further, a staggering 94 programmes across all colleges have their cutoff pegged at 99% or higher this year. This is three times higher than 2020, when a total of 30 programmes across all colleges had cutoffs in this range. Pre-pandemic, in 2019, there was just one programme in the first list with 99% cutoff — political science at Hindu College.

To put this in perspective, less than 1% of the candidates who cleared the CBSE Board exam this year are eligible to seek admission to 94 programmes under the first list. About 550 CBSE students, out of roughly 13 lakh, had scored between 495 and 499 out of 500 marks this year.

Former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh kept up his attack on Navjot Singh Sidhu on Thursday and said he thinks that the cricketer-turned-politician is undermining Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi’s authority. He also said the kind of situation that Sidhu has created was never seen before in Punjab.

Asked if Sidhu is undermining Channi’s authority, the veteran Congress leader, who returned to Chandigarh on Thursday evening after a visit to Delhi, said, “I think so.” “Sidhu’s job is to run party affairs and Channi’s job is to run the government. There is never any interference. I have been the PCC chief thrice. “The two (the Pradesh Congress Committee chief and the chief minister) consult each other, but the final decision is of Channi, who is the chief minister, not Sidhu,” Singh told reporters at the Chandigarh airport.