Northeast rejig: Rahul Gandhi reconstitutes party's co-ordination committee

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hopeful of winning most of the 25 Lok Sabha seats of the northeastern states in the 2019 elections. After a lacklustre performance in recent Assembly polls in the northeastern states, Congress has finally woken up to the challenge. Until recently, the Congress units in all the northeastern states were handled by its Rajasthan leader C P Joshi. 

But Joshi didn't endear himself to the Congress workers in the region, and has now been removed. On Tuesday, Congress president Rahul Gandhi reconstituted the party’s northeast coordination committee with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as its patron and former Meghalaya Chief Minister Mukul Sangma as its chairman. Singh is a Rajya Sabha member from Assam. Assembly polls are scheduled in Mizoram in November-December.

Trolled by mistake

Indian Railways and Western Railways came under much criticism on social media after a road overbridge collapsed on rail tracks in suburban Andheri (Mumbai) amid heavy rains, bringing local services of the Western Railway to a halt. In no time, Twitter users began trolling Indian Railways for poor infrastructure maintenance and questioned the need for bullet trains. As it turned out, the bridge is maintained by the municipal authorities of Mumbai. “We have no major role in the maintenance of that bridge, but social media doesn’t understand all these things,” rued a Railway official.

Sisterly act

Yoga proponent Ramdev drew Union minister Uma Bharti’s ire after he stated that files were stuck during Bharti’s tenure as the Union Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Minister, and that things changed after Gadkari took over. He made the claim in a television interview in London. 

Bharti shot off a letter to the Patanjali group founder, saying no comparison is possible in terms of speed as the project was in the planning stage during her time and now it is in the executed phase. She admonished Ramdev for “not being sensitive to her self-respect”. Left on the backfoot, Ramdev tweeted: “I consider her my sister and did not intend to hurt her self-respect."