Category: Bengal

T-shirts with images of Mamata Banerjee, Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and logo of CPI (M). Reuters/Rupak De Chowdhuri The party has virtually no opposition in West Bengal. This has led to an entrenchment of violent elements.

Durga as a homeless mother. Painting by Bikash Bhattacharjee Durga Pujo was never overtly religious. Moreover, the contempt of orthodoxy is a sacred responsibility of the secular public. The controversy regarding an advertisement in local dailies in West Bengal by the popular salon chain Jawed Habib has attracted some attention. The advertisement shows the retinue of Durga, her children and their vahanas visiting a Jawed Habib parlour to get decked up for their visit to the earthly domains. The illustration…

People walking past destroyed furniture caused by riots on Wellesly St in Calcutta, 1946. Archival image. The BJP has long had its eye on West Bengal, because without it, its idea of a Hindu Rashtra cannot fully be realised. The political locus of Bengal is rapidly shifting. In early April this year, the BJP used Ram Navami – an obscure festival in the local calendar – to flaunt a toxic brand of Hindutva, arming the children and youth with swords…

No armchair politics. Mamata Banerjee in a file photo. Photographer Unknown A weakened opposition is unlikely to force Mamata to improve governance. Expectedly, Mamata Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) has returned to power in West Bengal. Yet, the scale of its triumph boggles the mind. The AITC has, in fact, tallied the maximum amount of seats ever won by a single party in West Bengal. The results, similarly, will baffle the surgeons of the Left-Congress alliance, for they had…

Fade out. Free wallpaper by Dipanjano. There’s little to choose between the Trinamool and the Left in West Bengal Bengal started to vote on Monday and will do so for a month and a half. This is the first time in recent memory that a party other than the CPM, as part of a ruling Left Front, is the incumbent party. This is also the first time in recent history that the Congress and the Left parties, after having long…

Bengal burning. Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash The politics of annihilation and obstructionism that is becoming endemic in the state portents very badly for its immediate future, whatever be the nature of change, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury Something is rotten in the state of Bengal. The current cycle of proactive and retroactive violence and the overall collapse of services is so overwhelming that one cannot but feel delirious at the vulgarity of the current deportment of its political class.

A dock docked. Photo by Eric Gonzalez/Unsplash Nano has made a joke out of Bengal – a cruel, real, practical joke. The entire world was waiting keenly to see if nano comes out of the greenfield venture in Singur. And we know, well almost, that it won’t. Where it goes from here is secondary. But one thing is for sure. As the factory moves out in small parcels out of Singur, it takes away with it hope; that…

Done deal. Photo by Minh Pham/Unsplash The Tatas have not yet made it clear if they are staying put or going from Singur. After Sunday’s ‘rapprochement’ between the West Bengal government and the Mamata Banerjee-led agitators, it seems that the Tatas will have to let go of a few hundred acres from the Tata Nano factory premises. But the 300-odd acres of land to be doled out to farmers who are against selling their land has turned out…

Switched off. Photo by Yogesh Pedamkar/Unsplash The word ‘power’ has evolved into two disparate but related meanings. The more banal of the two refers to the production and distribution of energy for industrial and domestic use. The other meaning, the favourite object of inquiry of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, refers to a complex mechanism by which authority is applied to help sustain predominance and strategies of exploitation. But the application of the second…

All lines are drawn. Photo by Adrien Bruneau on Unsplash There has not been a time in Bengal’s history, at least in recent memory, like the past two months. The death of young Rizwanur, the violence in Nandigram, the sudden riots against granting residency to Taslima Nasreen — all have created a vortex of socio-political reactions that seem to have shaken up the arrogance of the ruling CPM and mobilised the crowds. One significant fallout of Bengal’s autumn…