England opt to field in rain-interrupted Lord's Test
London, Aug 10 : England skipper Joe Root won the toss and opted to field against India on the second day of the rain-shortened second cricket Test at the Lord's here on Friday.
India have made two changes in their playing XI by bringing in Cheteshwar Pujara and chinaman Kuldeep Yadav in place of opener Shikhar Dhawan and pacer Umesh Yadav, respectively.
The hosts also made a couple of changes by handing Test debut to young batsman Ollie Pope in place of an off-colour Dawid Malan, and brought in Chris Woakes after being forced to drop all-rounder Ben Stokes due to his ongoing court case.
India: Murali Vijay, Lokesh Rahul, Cheteshwar Pujara, Virat Kohli (Captain), Ajinkya Rahane, Dinesh Karthik(WK), Hardik Pandya, Ravichandran Ashwin, Kuldeep Yadav, Mohammed Shami, Ishant Sharma.
England: Alastair Cook, Keaton Jennings, Joe Root (Captain), Ollie Pope, Jonny Bairstow (WK), Jos Buttler, Chris Woakes, Sam Curran, Adil Rashid, Stuart Broad, James Anderson.
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Mamata continues sit-in for second successive day over Bengal voter roll deletions
Kolkata (PTI): West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee continued her protest against alleged arbitrary deletions in the post-SIR electoral rolls for the second consecutive day on Saturday, after she spent the night at the sit-in site here.
Banerjee had begun the demonstration at Metro Channel in central Kolkata on Friday, accusing the Election Commission of conspiring with the BJP to “disenfranchise Bengal voters” ahead of the upcoming assembly elections.
The chief minister stayed overnight at the protest site, surrounded by senior Trinamool Congress leaders, legislators and party workers, turning the busy Esplanade stretch into a makeshift political camp.
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Addressing supporters on Friday afternoon, Banerjee alleged that large numbers of genuine voters were being removed from the electoral rolls under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.
The CM also reiterated her claim that several voters had been "wrongly marked as dead” and said she would present such individuals before the media and the Election Commission to expose what she described as an "attempt to manipulate the voter list to help the BJP in the upcoming assembly polls".
Senior TMC leaders and state ministers remained present at the venue, while party supporters gathered at the protest site in the morning.
The protest comes just days before the full bench of the Election Commission is scheduled to visit West Bengal, amid rising political tensions over the voter list revision ahead of the assembly polls.
According to official data released on February 28, as many as 63.66 lakh names — around 8.3 per cent of the electorate — have been deleted since the SIR process began in November last year, reducing the voter base from about 7.66 crore to just over 7.04 crore.
In addition, over 60.06 lakh electors have been placed under the “under adjudication” category, meaning their eligibility will be determined through legal scrutiny in the coming weeks, a process that could further reshape constituency-level electoral equations.
