The Catch Up: 29 April

This is the Catch Up on 3 Things for the Indian Express and I'm Flora Swain.
It’s the 29th of April and here are today's headlines.

The Congress in Madhya Pradesh received a setback today with its Indore candidate, Akshay Kanti Bam, withdrawing his nomination. BJP spokesperson Pankaj Chaturvedi confirmed the development to The Indian Express and said, quote, “The Congress candidate has withdrawn his nomination. This is the failure of Congress leadership. It’s a failure of their policies. Their vote bank politics, inheritance politics… has backfired. Congress karyakartas were already leaving, and now the leaders have joined.” Unquote. 

As the Karnataka Special Investigation Team launches a probe into allegations of sexual abuse by JD(S) MP and its Hassan candidate Prajwal Revanna, G Devaraje Gowda, a BJP leader told The Indian Express that he wrote an email and a letter to BJP state unit president BY Vijayendra as well as the central leadership on the allegations on 8th of December last year.

Will an ex-Muslim continue to be governed by the Muslim personal law — the Shariat Act of 1937 — or by the secular laws of the country in matters of succession? The Supreme Court today agreed to consider the “important point” and issued notice on a writ petition filed by a woman from Kerala raising the question. The notice came from a bench on a petition filed by Safiya PM. In her plea, Safiya sought a “declaration that persons who do not want to be governed by the Muslim Personal Law must be allowed to be governed by the secular law of the country, viz, the Indian Succession Act, 1925 both in the case of intestate and testamentary succession”.

In an interview to a leading national daily, Prime Minister Narendra Modi doubled down on his remarks against the Congress party over “appeasement” and “inheritance tax”. When asked about the Congress’s “polarisation” charge against the BJP, PM Modi said, quote “It is not polarisation to show that Congress has violated the Constitution and enacted laws providing reservation on the basis of religion. Our Constitution clearly prohibits reservations based on religion but the Congress govt in Karnataka reversed the law passed by BJP to provide reservation to OBCs and gave it to Muslims, classifying all Muslims as OBC.” unquote.

When asked about the disappointment that the manifestos of the Congress and other parties of the INDIA bloc are completely silent on Article 370, Omar Abdullah told the Indian Express, "We do have friends who have talked about it — TMC, DMK, the Left. They have stuck their necks out for J&K and are against everything that happened on August 5, 2019. While the Congress is unable to find common cause with us on this particular issue, it is disappointing but I do understand. I understand that they have to trade off their commitment to J&K with the wider electoral arithmetic that they need to factor in." Unquote.

This was the Catch-Up on the 3 Things by The Indian Express.