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Assembly Elections
The Election Commission will announce dates for assembly polls on Sunday evening. Polls are due in West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Assam and Puducherry. The poll authority has convened a press conference at 4 pm to announce the schedule. The terms of these legislative assemblies are ending on different dates in May and June. Final electoral rolls of the four states and the Union territory of Puducherry have been published as part of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voters' list.
The Election Commission has reactivated its economic intelligence panel after a gap of six years to curb the use of money, liquor and drugs to influence voters ahead of the Bihar polls. The Multi-Departmental Committee on Election Intelligence (MDCEI) met here on Friday for the first time since 2019 to fine-tune the strategy of enforcement agencies and central police forces to prevent the use of money power and freebies to sway voters in poll-bound Bihar. The committee was formed in 2014 ahead of that year's general elections. Officials said the committee met ahead of polls between 2014 and 2019, but did not do so formally thereafter. Agency and security forces' heads had been meeting to strategise steps to check money power. On Friday, they met on a bigger scale. Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and Election Commissioners S S Sandhu and Vivek Joshi were present at the meeting. The committee includes 17 departments -- Central Board of Direct Taxes, Central Board of Indire
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch his campaign for the Bihar assembly polls next week, with as many as four election rallies scheduled by the end of this month, state BJP president Dilip Jaiswal said on Sunday. Addressing a press conference here, Jaiswal said Modi will kick off his campaign with a rally in Samastipur on October 24, followed by another election meeting in Begusarai the very same day. "The PM, who is among the world's tallest leaders, will visit Karpoori Gram, the birthplace of Bharat Ratna Karpoori Thakur, in Samastipur district, and pay his tributes to the former Bihar CM before addressing his first rally. His second rally will be in Begusarai in the afternoon," he said. Jaiswal said the PM will be back in the poll-bound state on October 30, when he will be addressing rallies in Muzaffarpur and Chhapra, the town where Saran district is headquartered. "The PM's rallies are also scheduled on November 2, 3, 6 and 7. Details of these will be shared in due course