Will SP and BSP sink their differences and collaborate for the UP bypolls?

Suspense over UP bypolls
 

Three ministers in the Adityanath government — Satyadev Pachauri, Rita Bahuguna Joshi and SPS Baghel— have become MPs. The party will have to fill these vacancies and also find candidates for the bypolls. So the BJP MLAs are all agog. The Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party are currently being quite reserved towards each other. Will they sink their differences and collaborate? Is it going to be Mahagathbandhan redux? Or is Akhilesh Yadav going to be at the mercy of his family once again? We will know soon enough, as soon as the Election Commission announces the dates of the by-polls.

Internal tussle not helping Congress
 

Being ambitious is all very well. But do politicians have to be rude about it? The Amrinder Singh-Navjot Sidhu tussle is the Congress’s worst kept secret. Along the way, things are being done and said that will never be forgotten. During the election campaign, when Priyanka Gandhi Vadra visited Gurdaspur and Bhatinda to campaign, she was accompanied by Sidhu. Upon landing, Sidhu ignored the Captain and spoke only briefly to Asha Kumari, the Punjab in-charge, when she went up to him. Maybe Sidhu thought that by doing so, he was conveying a power signal to those who were watching. Earlier, at a meeting at Pathankot, when party workers hired a wedding band to greet her with Bhangra music, Priyanka broke into an impromptu dance step with Sidhu joining in. This too was part of optics. The point is, all this is doing the Congress no good at all. When will they ever learn?