Author: Bikash C Paul

Bengal’s religious imagination carries a distinctly feminine force. The Bengali Hindu psyche has been shaped not by the warrior prince of Ayodhya, Ram, but by the fierce mother goddess. Bengal bows before Kali, weeps before Durga, sings to Shyama, and surrenders itself to the maternal divine. Religion here is emotional, poetic and intimate. The cry of “Jai Maa Kali” or “Bolo Durga Mai Ki Jai” emerges not as slogans of conquest, but as invocations of protection, suffering and spiritual belonging. That Bengal now increasingly echoes with “Jai Shri Ram” is not merely a political shift. It is a civilisational and…

The formal assumption of office by Suvendu Adhikari and his cabinet marks not merely a transfer of power in West Bengal, but the possible beginning of a civilisational correction within the state’s political life. Governments change in democracies all the time. What is far more difficult to change is political culture. Bengal’s tragedy over the last five decades is that while regimes changed, the underlying political culture remained disturbingly intact. That culture, rooted in cadre dominance, ideological intimidation, politicisation of institutions and the normalisation of political violence, is the single greatest obstacle to Bengal’s economic and social revival today. If…

Mamata Banerjee has taken West Bengal into dangerous territory. By refusing to accept electoral defeat and continuing to hold on to the office of Chief Minister, Mamata has converted what should have been a routine democratic transition into a test of constitutional order. Her claim that the All India Trinamool Congress was “made to lose” by the Union government, the Election Commission of India, and central forces is not merely political rhetoric. It is a direct assault on the legitimacy of the electoral process. This is not the first time an Indian politician has cried foul after defeat. But it…

What ended the long, formidable run of Mamata Banerjee was not a single wave, but a convergence of pressures: administrative, economic, organisational and psychological. The defeat of the Trinamool Congress, hence, reflects a layered voter verdict. Stripped of rhetoric, here are the nine clearest faultlines that cumulatively brought her down: GOVERNANCE FATIGUE SET IN: After over 15 years in power, the distinction between agitation politics and governance blurred. Mamata continued to rely on confrontation and symbolism, but voters increasingly demanded administrative delivery: roads, jobs, investment, law-and-order consistency. The “permanent protest” model of Mamata lost credibility as her establishment failed to…

There is a certain discomfort in that now-viral image of Prannoy Roy—76, slightly stooped, camera slung with the ease of a field reporter rather than a studio patriarch. The photograph does not simply evoke nostalgia; it points to a rupture. It is less about a man returning to the field and more about a profession that has gradually abandoned it. For those of us who came of age inside NDTV, this is not sentimentality. It is memory anchored in practice. Editorial meetings where numbers were interrogated like evidence; where a misplaced decimal point could halt a broadcast; where silence in…

On a shrinking island in the Sundarbans, Abdul Rahman gestures toward a stretch of brown water. “That used to be our courtyard,” he says. There is no drama in the statement. No storm, no singular disaster. Just a quiet subtraction of land, year after year, until the house, then the fields, then the village itself, cease to exist. This is how displacement happens in this part of India: incrementally, invisibly and almost always without record. Across India’s eastern delta, particularly in the Sundarbans, a form of migration is underway that resists classification. It is not triggered by a single calamity…

A decade of surveillance, precision missiles and a window of opportunity that lasted one morning It did not begin with bombs. It began with a traffic camera. Somewhere along Pasteur Street in central Tehran, a quiet artery flanked by government compounds and the layered security infrastructure of the Islamic Republic, a lens was watching. It had been watching for years. Unknown to the men it surveilled, the footage it captured was not streaming to Iranian state servers. It had been encrypted, rerouted and was arriving, frame by frame, at intelligence analysis facilities in Tel Aviv and southern Israel. That single…

By almost every measurable indicator, India’s federal investigative machinery has never been more visible. Agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), once confined largely to the specialised pages of legal reporting, now occupy the centre of the country’s political theatre. Over the past decade, some of India’s most powerful political figures have found themselves under the scrutiny of probe agencies. Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are in the National Herald case. Former Union finance minister P Chidambaram in the INX Media and Aircel-Maxis investigations. Rashtriya Janata Dal patriarch Lalu Prasad Yadav…

India’s public-school network was built village by village, habitation by habitation, over decades. It carried the constitutional promise of universal education into the country’s poorest districts. Today, that map is being redrawn. And the scale and consequence are quite large. Official data show a measurable decline in the number of government schools over the past decade. The shift is not anecdotal. It is recorded in the national education database maintained under the Unified District Information System for Education Plus, commonly known as UDISE+. The database captures every recognised school, teacher and enrolment across India. The most recent UDISE+ releases indicate…

For months, Washington appeared determined to force New Delhi into a corner. Tariffs were announced, revised, and raised again. Public remarks from the White House grew increasingly sharp, often straying from trade into open disparagement of India’s economy and its leadership. The tone was unmistakable: pressure applied loudly, publicly and repeatedly, in the expectation that India would eventually yield. That assumption proved wrong. Instead of reacting, India absorbed the blows without theatrics. When, yesterday, Donald Trump finally announced the rollback of tariffs from a punitive 50 per cent to 18 per cent, it marked the end of months of uncertainty.…