Passengers of the New Delhi-Guwahati Rajdhani Express got a providential escape on Tuesday morning when the train was derailed in eastern Bihar after suspected Maoists removed two metres of railtrack.

Facing a tantalising opportunity to taste power in Jharkhand, the Congress on Tuesday started unhurried but determined efforts to get its ally JVM(P), led by former chief minister Babulal Marandi, to join it in supporting the Shibu Soren government.

Passengers of the New Delhi-Guwahati Rajdhani Express escaped with minor injuries on Tuesday morning when the train was derailed in eastern Bihar due to the removal of two metres of the tracks by suspected Maoists.

In Jharkhand’s fractured politics in the aftermath of the BJP’s withdrawal of support to the Shibu Soren-led coalition government on Monday, the state’s first chief minister and leader of the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik), Babulal Marandi, holds the keys to the formation of the next government.

The frayed marriage of convenience between the JMM and the BJP in Jharkhand fell apart on Monday after a distraught BJP formally withdrew support to the Shibu Soren-led government, bringing an end to a protracted political stalemate and reducing the state’s five-month-old coalition government to a minority.

With Bihar’s caste cauldron already getting politically spiced up ahead of the Assembly polls, RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav is busy appeasing his core caste constituency of Yadavs, who had largely shifted allegiance to the ruling JD(U)-BJP in recent years to deliver successive electoral jolts to the RJD.

Possibilities of the JMM breaking its ties with ally BJP and continuing to head the Jharkhand government with support from the UPA rose on Sunday as beleaguered chief minister and JMM supremo Shibu Soren indicated that he was unlikely to resign on May 25, the deadline agreed between the JMM and the BJP for a change of guard.

Speculation was rife in Jharkhand on Saturday about a Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-UPA government being formed after May 25, the deadline agreed between the JMM and the Bharatiya Janata Party for the resign

The Bihar government has been directed by the state human rights commission to pay Rs 40,000 to each of ten people who were wrongly sent to jail due to shoddy investigations by the police. The ten people were jailed after fabricated charges of murder and abduction were levelled against them in two separate cases.

A reporter of a Patna-based news channel was on Thursday outrageously likened to convicted Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab by a college principal before he was confined inside the principal’s chamber and badly beaten up by his staff while covering a student agitation.