Malian PM resigns as anger mounts over massacre
Bamako: Mali's prime minister resigned along with his entire government on Thursday following criticism over their handling of an upsurge of violence in the centre of the country and a massacre last month that left 160 people dead.
A statement from President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita's office said he had accepted Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga's resignation, along with those of his ministers, two weeks after mass protests erupted over the rising tide of violence.
Lawmakers from both ruling and opposition parties had submitted a motion of no confidence against the government on Wednesday, blaming Maiga and his administration for failing to clamp down on the unrest.
"A prime minister will be named very soon and a new government will be put in place after consultations with all political forces" from both the ruling and opposition sides, the statement from Keita's office said. The president had on Tuesday said in a televised address that he had "heard the anger", without explicitly naming the prime minister.
The government had come under mounting pressure over its handling of violence in the restive Mopti region and especially a massacre on March 23 in which 160 people were killed in the village of Ogossagou near the border with Burkina Faso.
Members of the Dogon ethnic group -- a hunting and farming community with a long history of tension with the nomadic Fulani people over access to land -- were accused of being behind the mass killing.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Bamako on April 5 to protest against the upsurge of violence, accusing the government of not doing enough to stop it. The protest was called by Muslim religious leaders, organisations representing the Fulani herding community, opposition parties and civil society groups.
Mali has been struggling to restore stability since Islamist extremists linked to Al-Qaeda took control of the country's vast desert north in early 2012. While the jihadists were largely driven out in a French-led military operation that began in January 2013, huge areas are still in the grip of lawlessness, despite a 2015 peace agreement with some armed groups that sought to definitively stamp out the Islamist threat.
Since then, militants have shifted from the north towards the more densely populated centre of the country, where they have sharpened ancient rivalries and ethnic conflicts that date back years. Jihadist attacks have also spread to Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger, forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes.
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Voting begins for high-stakes civic polls in Maharashtra; all eyes on big battle for Mumbai
Mumbai (PTI): Voting in 29 municipal corporations across Maharashtra began on Thursday morning with spotlight on Mumbai, where the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance is locked in an intense battle with the reunited Thackeray cousins for control of India's largest and richest civic body.
Polling for 2,869 seats spread across 893 wards in these municipal corporations began amid tight security at 7.30 am and will conclude at 5.30 pm. A total of 3.48 crore voters are eligible to decide the fate of 15,931 candidates.
In the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), whose annual budget is over Rs 74, 400 crore, 1,700 candidates are vying for 227 seats in elections being held after nine years, after a four-year delay. More than 25,000 police personnel have been deployed across Mumbai to oversee elections.
Except for Mumbai, the other urban bodies have multi-member wards. Vote count will take place on January 16.
These are the first BMC polls since the 2022 split in the Shiv Sena when Eknath Shinde, now Deputy Chief Minister, broke away with a majority of the party’s MLAs and allied with the BJP to become the chief minister.
The undivided Shiv Sena held sway over India's richest civic body for 25 years (1997-2022).
In a significant political turn of events ahead of the elections, estranged cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray, who head Shiv Sena (UBT) and MNS, respectively, reunited last month after two decades in their bid to consolidate Marathi votes even as rival NCP factions forged a local alliance in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.
The Congress, once a formidable political force in Maharashtra, has asserted its presence in Mumbai by stepping out of the shadow of its Maha Vikas Aghadi allies - Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP).
The grand old party has joined hands with Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) and the Rashtriya Samaj Paksh in the state capital.
Elections to the 29 municipal corporations are being held after a gap of several years, with terms of most of them having ended between 2020 and 2023. Of these, nine fall in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), the most urbanised belt in India.
Voting is underway in the following municipal corporations: Mumbai, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Navi Mumbai, Vasai-Virar, Kalyan-Dombivli, Kolhapur, Nagpur, Solapur, Amravati, Akola, Nashik, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune, Ulhasnagar, Thane, Chandrapur, Parbhani, Mira-Bhayandar, Nanded-Waghala, Panvel, Bhiwandi-Nizampur, Latur, Malegaon, Sangli-Miraj-Kupwad, Jalgaon, Ahilyanagar, Dhule, Jalna and Ichalkaranji.
