There’s a strong buzz that Kamal Nath may switch to the BJP in a fresh jolt to the Congress ahead of the national elections, with sources close to him telling NDTV that he is “unhappy” with the party.

The former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister arrived in Delhi on Saturday, adding fuel to the speculations. But he hasn’t met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah and has only heard BJP state leaders like VD Sharma saying he is welcome to join their party, sources said.

The people in Chhindwara – which Mr Nath has represented nine times in Lok Sabha – want him to join the BJP to ensure better development and the matter is under his consideration, sources said.

The constituency is now represented by Kamal Nath’s son Nakul Nath, who is also being speculated to join the BJP along with his father. Nakul Nath had removed ‘Congress’ from his social media bio, leading to the mega crossover buzz yesterday, but sources said his bio never mentioned the party’s name.

Kamal Nath’s Delhi trip comes at a time BJP is holding a two-day national council, being attended by top leaders from across the country.

Read | Can Indiraji’s “Third Son” Ever Leave Party? Congress Leader On Kamal Nath

He hasn’t resigned from Congress, but feels the party isn’t the same that he had joined five decades ago and has conveyed his unhappiness to the leadership, the sources said.

“He feels that Rahul Gandhi is busy with the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra and the party is now being run by the likes of senior leaders Jairam Ramesh, KC Venugopal, and Randeep Surjewala,” the sources said.

They also ruled out that his unhappiness was over not being nominated to the Rajya Sabha, and said senior leader Digvijaya Singh had requested him not to leave the party.

The Congress has denied reports that Mr Nath will end his long association with the party, stressing that former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had called him her “third son” while campaigning for him in 1979.

“Can you think even in a dream that Indira Gandhi’s ‘third son’ will quit the Congress? Can he think of leaving the workers who fought the Assembly elections under his leadership and worked tirelessly to try and make him the chief minister,” said Jitu Patwari, who had replaced him as the state Congress chief after the party’s election setback last year.

Kamal Nath’s switchover would deliver a major blow to the Congress ahead of the national elections. The grand old party is already reeling from a string of high-profile exits, the latest being former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan, who joined the BJP earlier this week.

Mr Nath’s exit will leave the party vulnerable in Madhya Pradesh, where the Congress had won just one seat in 2019 elections.

His former colleague Jyotiraditya Scindia, now a Union Minister, had crossed over to the BJP after a mega revolt that had brought down the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh in 2020.

Alexey Navalny’s death removes the most prominent opponent of President Vladimir Putin, and sends another unmistakable signal of the dangers of standing up to the Russian leader’s increasingly repressive regime.

Ever since he rose to international prominence in massive pro-democracy protests in Russia in 2011-2012, it was evident to both the Kremlin and Putin’s opponents that the charismatic and witty Navalny had the potential to become a serious political challenge.

It was equally clear that Navalny was living on borrowed time after he returned to Russia in early 2021 and defied warnings of imprisonment.

Navalny’s death had been confirmed in an “official message” to his mother, said Kira Yarmysh, his spokesperson, on the X social media platform and in a video statement on Saturday.  

The fate of the opposition activist follows a fatal plane crash that killed Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin last year. Prigozhin, who became a hero to Russian nationalists for his part in fighting in Ukraine, was reported killed in August, exactly two months after leading a mutiny against the Defense Ministry’s leadership that spiraled into the biggest threat to Putin’s nearly quarter-century rule.  

The two incidents serve to remove figures who publicly opposed Putin, though from very different perspectives. That alone sends a powerful message to Russians and to the world as the second anniversary nears of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that triggered a wave of sanctions and prompted the US and its allies to supply weaponry to Kyiv.

Navalny’s death was announced on the eve of official campaigning for the March 17 presidential election in which Putin is seeking a fifth term. Government leaders quickly accused the Kremlin and some directly blamed Putin, the former KGB officer who’s on course to equal Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin’s record term as ruler in Moscow.

Russian authorities have yet to disclose a cause of death, saying Navalny felt unwell after a walk and lost consciousness. Just a day earlier, he’d appeared on video from prison at a court hearing, joking cheerfully with officials.

Putin was so hostile to Navalny that he refused to use his name when reporters asked questions about the activist, a trend followed by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. Russian state television, which for years had banned any mention of Navalny, briefly reported his demise.

With relations between Russia and the West already largely severed over Putin’s attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, it’s unclear if US and European condemnation of Navalny’s death will turn into more concrete penalties against the Kremlin.

Friends and allies of Navalny had worried constantly for his safety in prison as the Kremlin engaged in the biggest crackdown on dissent in decades to crush opposition to the war.

That concern intensified when Navalny, 47, was transferred to a remote Arctic prison colony, IK-3, in late December from a jail outside Moscow. In his last post on X, formerly Twitter, on Feb. 14, he reported that he’d been sentenced to 15 days in a punishment cell for the fourth time since he’d arrived there.

He’d been advocating from prison on social media for a nationwide protest during the presidential election, encouraging people to arrive at polling stations at exactly midday to vote against Putin. Navalny had also condemned the invasion of Ukraine.

His death is the latest in a string of incidents involving leading critics of the Kremlin.

Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, was assassinated in Moscow within sight of the Kremlin walls in February 2015. Campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment building on Putin’s birthday in October 2006.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, another prominent opposition figure sentenced to 25 years for treason in April after he condemned the invasion of Ukraine, has accused the Russian authorities of twice poisoning him in the past.

In his early years at least, Navalny courted controversy by reaching out to nationalist elements who were hostile to the Kremlin as well as to foreigners and minorities. Navalny justified the ties by arguing he was trying to build a broad coalition against Putin, but many liberal activists remained suspicious of him.

Fearless and Internet-savvy, Navalny gained a huge online following in Russia with investigations exposing corruption at state companies and among top officials, using social media posts to bypass the blackout on state television. In January 2021, he caused a storm with a video exposing a lavish $1.3 billion Black Sea palace that he said was built for Putin.

The video, which has been viewed more than 129 million times on YouTube, was released after Navalny was detained when he returned to Russia from Germany, where he’d been treated for a nerve-agent poisoning in Siberia in 2020 that he and the West blamed on the Kremlin. Russia denied involvement.

Later that year, Russia outlawed Navalny’s nationwide network of campaign groups as “extremist,” forcing activists to disband and many to flee abroad. Navalny himself was suffering from worsening health in prison and looked gaunt at court hearings after spending 24 days on hunger strike to demand better medical care.

The fate of the opposition leader and his movement, made up of mostly young professionals, contrasted starkly with the early optimism of the massive protests in 2011-2012 against Putin’s return to the presidency in place of Dmitry Medvedev. The Kremlin crackdown that had followed failed to dim their determination.

When Navalny was unexpectedly allowed to contest Moscow mayoral elections in September 2013, following widespread protests in support of his release from detention, he came within a whisker of forcing a run-off against Sergei Sobyanin, the incumbent Putin ally. He got 27% against 51% for Sobyanin.

That was the last time Navalny was permitted to run. When he mounted a campaign to challenge Putin in the 2018 presidential election, officials barred him from the ballot because of a fraud conviction that Navalny, the US, and the European Union had criticized as politically motivated.

“Navalny was essentially killed when he was arrested years ago,” said Thad Troy, managing director of Crumpton Global and a former CIA officer in Moscow. “It’s an inevitable next step for Putin to strengthen his hold over Russia.”

In prison, Navalny continued his defiance of Putin. He also disclosed that he’d developed a belief in God after years of atheism, surprising many of his supporters.

“Our country is built on injustice. But tens of millions of people want the truth,” he told a court during a failed 2021 appeal hearing. “And sooner or later they’ll get it.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

India should not be criticised for having multiple options, asserted External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday when asked about the country’s foreign policy priorities in the backdrop of observations that it is traversing from “non-alignment to all alignment”.

His remarks came at an interactive session at a security conference in Munich in the presence of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

While putting the question, the moderator specifically mentioned India’s continuing procurement of crude oil from Russia notwithstanding Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Why should it be a problem? I am smart enough to have multiple options. You should be admiring and not criticising. Is it a problem for others? I do not think so,” he said.

In that context, Mr Jaishankar explained the different pulls and pressures countries face, adding that different nations have different histories and challenges and it is very hard to have a unidimensional relationship.

“I do not want you, even inadvertently, to give the impression that we are purely and unsentimentally transactional. We are not. We get along with people, we believe in things, we share things…but there are times when you are located in different places, different levels of development, different experiences, all of that gets into it,” he explained.

“So life is complicated, life is differentiated,” he said.

“Good partners provide choices, smart partners take some of those choices” Mr Jaishankar said.

The External Affairs Minister also described the October 7 attacks on Israeli cities by Hamas as “terrorism” but at the same time, referring to Tel Aviv’s response, said Israel has an international obligation to observe the humanitarian law. He also highlighted India’s long-held position of a “two-state solution” on the Palestine issue.

Israel has been continuing its military offensive in Gaza as part of its retaliation to the unprecedented attack on Israeli cities by Hamas on October 7. India strongly condemned the terror attack by Hamas and has been calling for de-escalation of the situation.

To a question, the External Affairs Minister said the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India- China-South Africa) grouping started in an era when Western dominance was very strong.

Mr Jaishankar said last year, around 30 countries showed interest in being part of BRICS as they saw value in it. There must be something good we have done, he said.

“I think it is important today to make a distinction between being non-West and anti-West. I would certainly characterise India as a country which is non-West but which has extremely strong relations with the Western countries that is getting better by the day,” he added.