'Mamata has used minorities only as her vote bank.' 'In her entire election campaign Mamata did not utter a single sentence against the RSS.'
Taking a dig at Narendra Modi for his poll campaign in north eastern states, the Shiv Sena on Monday said the prime minister should have taken out time to visit drought-hit Marathwada as well.
The manner in which a large proportion of common people have mortgaged their rationality and questioning spirit to let hatred, prejudice, and bigotry take over their minds is a cause of worry, observes Mohammad Sajjad.
The incident, West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar said, has put the country's democratic history to "shame".
Yechury could play the role Harkishan Singh Surjeet had played in 1996 and 2004 to unify the opposition, writes Archis Mohan.
While Yechury feels CPI-M should unite with others to fight the 'growing danger of fascistic forces', Karat camp says it should fight the BJP, but not have any leaning towards the Congress or other opposition parties.
Several police officers who followed the Election Commission's orders during the recent West Bengal assembly polls get punishment transfers. Payal Mohanka reports.
For now, the BJP's strategy for Khushbu seems to be one of denial -- denying the rival Congress in the state and also at the national-level a Muslim voice acceptable to Hindu audiences and TV news-watchers. This is much less than the induction of DMK veterans like Duraiswamy and Selvam, who still have a greater chances of winning assembly seats,, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
'I am as Bengali as they come in my cultural and personal orientation and I think probably all the BJP candidates who are contesting are pretty non-vegetarian in their food and as Bengali in their cultural orientation.'
'It did not start as a Hindutva slogan.' 'It started to tease the TMC and slowly it got internalised and the BJP started countering with Jai Shri Ram slogans because Mamata was getting provoked.'
Dissident Trinamool Congress MP Somen Mitra on Friday said he has decided to leave the party and go back to the Congress, while stating he would resign from his Lok Sabha membership first.
A high voter turnout was recorded in West Bengal, Assam Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry assembly elections on Tuesday. The massive polling exercise following COVID-19 health protocol and involving lakhs of personnel began at 7 am and the last hour from 6 pm to 7 pm was set aside for COVID-19 patients and those under isolation. The counting of votes in the states will be held on May 2.
'If the chief minister says there are areas in her home state where she cannot enter, where has she driven the state to!'
Yechury has dropped enough hints that a fight is in the offing at the Hyderabad conclave in April, where any member may move an amendment to the draft on the party's electoral line. Archis Mohan reports.
Of the 294 candidates declared with serious criminal cases, 76 were from the TMC, 52 from the BJP, 47 from the CPI-M and 31 from the Congress.
With two years to go before West Bengal elects its next government, the BJP's internal objective is to scale down the Trinamool Congress tally from 211 to 45 seats. This amounts to an annihilation of the TMC while enabling the BJP to win a record 250 seats in the 295-member legislature, reports Radhika Ramaseshan
The matter was brought into public domain by the BJP's West Bengal unit president Dilip Ghosh who took to Twitter to slam the government for its directive.
Exit polls often go wrong in India because pollsters don't sample voters in the poorest parts of the country or the core support bases of different political parties, explains Professor Atanu Biswas of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday approved the biggest tax reform since Independence.
The Trinamool Congress won 211 seats.
Political economist Jayanta Roy Chowdhury analyses the 2016 West Bengal assembly election results.
In a virtual no-man's land ever since India became independent in 1947, more than 9,500 persons living in 51 enclaves in Coochbehar district are exercising their franchise for the first time on May 5.
A 10-time Lok Sabha MP, Chatterjee was a central committee member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist, which he had joined in 1968. He was the Speaker of the Lok Sabha from 2004 to 2009.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi lamented that every effort of the BJP was seen in "bad light".
The march to the secretariat in Howrah district was organised by the Left parties to protest against what they called attack on democracy, and unemployment and lawlessness in the state during Trinamool Congress rule.
'Having consumed thousands of the sickly sweet chenna globes of varying textures over the years, I must demur,' says Uttaran Das Gupta.
Political commentators say the final outcome of the West Bengal assembly elections would depend on how some crucial factors play out this time. Mayank Mishra explains.
The phase is crucial as it will decide the fate of several ministers -- Finance Minister Amit Mitra, Agriculture Minister Purnendu Basu, Law Minister Chandrima Bhattacharya, Tourism Minister Bratya Basu, Food and Supplies Minister Jyotipriyo Mullick and Agriculture Marketing Minister Aroop Roy.
Speaking to the media a day after he was released from Tihar Jail after he was charged for sedition, Kanhaiya thanked everyone who supported him and alleged that a conspiracy was afoot to malign the JNU campus and its students.
The Bharatiya Janata Party appeared to cede ground in Uttar Pradesh where Samajwadi Party was leading on six of the 11 Assembly seats where bypolls were held while it was neck and neck with Congress in Gujarat and behind in Rajasthan, exactly four months after it swept the three states in Lok Sabha elections.
'There is no difference morally between politicians scoring points amid the rubble and non-politicians who assume that politics and corruption necessarily had something to do with it,' says Mihir S Sharma. 'Both are twisting a tragedy to their own ends.'
Pulling no punches in her attack against the Bharatiya Janata Party for allegedly pursuing 'political vendetta' against the Trinamool Congress, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday charged that the Central Bureau of Investigation was being used as a 'political tool' by the National Democratic Alliance government and was functioning as 'a department of the Prime Minister's Office'.
Mamata Banerjee was on Friday sworn in as the chief minister of West Bengal for the second consecutive time, heading a 42-member ministry.
'The present government's greatest weakness is its intolerance. Tolerance is the key tenet of democracy. How can any government stop someone from speaking one's mind?'
Stepping up his offensive against the Congress, he asked the party to "repent" for what it has not done in the last 60 years.
The DoT is wrongly asking subscribers to link their mobile numbers to Aadhaar in order to keep them active, says Gopal Krishna.
Indrani Roy/Rediff.com explains what strengthened the saffron party's foothold in this eastern region of the country
Given her penchant for obfuscating issues Mamata is encouraging the false perception, parroted by her political hangers-on, that all refugees from Bangladesh would face the brunt of deportation once the BJP came to power. In fact, Didi's theatrics and those of all her extras, in the last few days, have been based on propagating this falsehood, says Dr Anirban Ganguly.
'People are tense. The morale of the perpetrators of the Kaliachak attack is very high.' 'People there fear that if the arsonists there could burn the police station today, they can burn the courts tomorrow; they will burn the collectorate.'
