Cracks in the ruling Left Front widened on Thursday on the issue of advancing of 2011 Assembly elections in West Bengal as demanded by a minor partner following repeated electoral reverses, with major allies saying the issue should be discussed and lead partner Communist Party of India-Marxist virtually rejecting the idea.
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on Friday stepped down as West Bengal chief minister following the Left Front's drubbing in the Assembly election at the hands of the Trinamool Congress-Congress combine that saw the collapse of the 34-year-old red bastion.
Toral Varia and photographer Reuben Verghese report on an emerging trend in the red bastions of Odisha's Keonjhar district: The rebels return home.
The feisty 56-year-old Banerjee, who is the founder and chairperson of the Trinamool Congress which she set up in 1998 after falling out with the Congress Party in West Bengal, can now have the satisfaction of a victorious General seeing all the war plans fall into place.
Rediff.com's Sanchari Bhattacharya visits Jhargram and Jungle Mahal, one of the most volatile areas of poll-bound West Bengal, and tries to figure out whether the 'winds of change' would blow away 'the red bastions'.
Rediff.com's Sanchari Bhattacharya visits Jhargram and Jungle Mahal, one of the most volatile areas of poll-bound West Bengal, and tries to figure out whether the 'winds of change' would blow away 'the red bastions.'
The Left Front government has roped in UK-based Saffron Brand Consultants, headed by image artist Wally Olins, to rebuild the image of brand Bengal.
When Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee became chief minister after Jyoti Basu stepped down in 2000, the younger generation could not have been happier. 'Change is about to set in' they thought. But the euphoria was short-lived.
The same political aide to chief minister's office who had spoken to rediff.com about Bhattacharjee's intent to step down on Monday said over telephone a day after, "I have never seen Buddhababu so perturbed as he was yesterday."
He served the right-wing organisation for around 16 years under the guidance of Gobinda Acharya and Krishnagopal Sharma, two prominent Sangh leaders.
'Manik Sarkar may have been able to hang on if he hadn't been a follower of the CPI-M's all-time hardliner Prakash Karat,' argues Amulya Ganguli.
Eleven persons, three of them local Communist Party of India-Marxist functionaries, were sentenced to life imprisonment in the sensational T P Chandrasekharan murder case by a special court in Kozhikode on Tuesday.
The main contest is between the CPI-M and the BJP in the February 18 assembly polls for 60 seats.
'The Congress party hated him because he had not gone to jail, he was not lathi charged, he had not gone on hunger strike.' 'They felt he had lived in London all his life and then he came to India and became an MP and a minister.'
The 61-year-old feisty leader, who had single-handedly wrecked the red bastion in West Bengal in 2011, was unfazed by the Left-Congress alliance ahead of the assembly polls.
The Trinamool Congress on Monday appeared set to sweep the crucial panchayat poll in West Bengal with a huge margin in most of the districts, taking a comfortable lead in gram panchayat in 12 of 17 districts.
Kanhaiya Kumar is India's latest political rockstar. More so in Mumbai, where his address this evening gave Mumbaikars a glimpse of the heydays of the Communist movement in the city of textiles mills and mill workers.
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