Former Indian cricketer Gautam Gambhir joined Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling birthday party on Friday, leaving a panel to determine whether to field him as a cricket-crazy candidate’s upcoming general election. With 9 million fans on Twitter, Gambhir ought to supply Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with some more pulling electricity in the marketing campaign for an election to run from April 11 until May 23.

A pinnacle-order batsman from New Delhi, Gambhir performed suit-prevailing knocks in two Cricket World Cup finals and led his membership team to 2 victories in the Indian Premier League. “I am joining this birthday celebration stimulated with the aid of our prime minister, his imaginative and prescient,” Gambhir, 37, instructed journalists after being inducted into the celebration via Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.

I’ve executed anything I may want to in cricket, and that is a splendid platform for me to do something truly top for this United States of America and take this birthday celebration ahead and make this country a higher place to live,” Jaitley said the birthday party’s election committee would decide if Gambhir will be nominated as a candidate. Before Gambhir, fellow batsman Navjot Singh Sidhu became a legislator for the BJP until he jumped to join the principal opposition Congress birthday party in 2017. The BJP has many different celebrities, especially actors, together with cupboard minister Smriti Z Irani.

MP Kirron Kher and Delhi birthday celebration leader Manoj Tiwari. Pollsters say the Hindu nationalist BJP’s probabilities have risen sharply due to the fact anxiety with neighboring Pakistan shot up after a Pakistan-primarily based armed organization claimed a deadly assault on Indian paramilitary police inside the disputed area Kashmir last month. Since the attack, Gambhir has urged India to forfeit Pakistan within the next World Cup starting stop-May.

Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz says there may be a hyperlink between a far-proper motion in his US and the suspect in an assault on mosques in the New Zealand town Christchurch in which 50 Muslims have been shot dead. The suspect, a 28-12 months-antique white supremacist, diagnosed as Australian-born Brenton Tarrant, donated 1,500 euros ($1,700) to the anti-immigration Identitarian Movement in Austria (above) in early 2018, according to prosecutors. On Monday, the home of Identitarian Movement spokesman Martin Sellner in Austria’s capital, Vienna, was searched as part of research into possible hyperlinks to the suspect.t

It has been confirmed that there may be a financial hyperlink between the man who perpetrated the assault in New Zealand and the Identitarian Movement in Austria,” Kurz instructed newshounds following a cupboard assembly on Wednesday. He also said the hyperlink could be investigated thoroughly and talked to interior and justice ministers about dissolving the distance-proper Identitarian Movement.

“Both ministries will mobilize all their way towards this movement,” he introduced. In a video posted on YouTube, Sellner denied having any hyperlink with the suspect beyond receiving the donation and having despatched an ordinary thank-you e-mail again. “I’m not a member of a terrorist company. I have nothing to do with this man; aside from that, I passively received a donation from him,” Sellner stated.