By Krishna Jha It was in June 2025, five months ahead of the Assembly elections in Bihar that Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was announced by Election Commission. The Commission cited concerns that several voters in the state were illegal immigrants who had obtained voter identity cards...
By Nilotpal Basu Dark clouds of deepening economic distress are looming over the country’s people with dire predictions for price rise adding to the twin crises of raging unemployment and stagnating wages that have been haunting the country for several years now. The US-Israel war on Iran and its...
By Francesca De Benedetti LONDON: Last summer, Giorgia Meloni’s Italian government approved a so-called “anti-Gandhi law,” which criminalizes even nonviolent protests and passive resistance. The highly controversial “Security Decree” was recently followed by a further one, introducing measures such as preventive detention during public gatherings and signalling a shift...
By K Raveendran Mamata Banerjee’s refusal to resign after a decisive electoral defeat is a political act dressed up as constitutional ambiguity. It may create noise, spectacle and temporary uncertainty, but it does not create a sustainable claim to office. A chief minister holds power only so long as...
By Dr. Gyan Pathak The data for the 2026 election results clearly show that delimitation of 2023 in Assam and the SIR of 2026 in West Bengal were chief factors of BJP’s spectacular wins in both the states respectively. As for the surge in the BJP’s support base, there...
By Ashok Nilakantan Ayers In the spring of 2026, what was expected to be a routine democratic exercise in West Bengal has spiralled into one of the most fraught constitutional moments in India’s recent political history. The votes have been counted, the results declared, and yet power remains contested—not...
By T N Ashok CHENNAI: In Tamil Nadu, electoral earthquakes are not new. But the 2026 verdict has produced something rarer than a landslide—it has delivered a political paradox. Vijay, the state’s newest political force and its most electrifying public figure, has shattered the long-entrenched dominance of the Dravidian...
By Sagarneel Sinha After the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, many political commentators started writing that the influence of the Hindutva politics pursued by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has started waning. However, the results of Haryana, Maharashtra, Delhi and Bihar forced them to revisit their...
By M A Hossain The urge to call it a “political miracle” is understandable. After all, the fall of Trinamool Congress (TMC) after fifteen years in power and the sweeping ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal looks, at first glance, like a sudden rupture. But...
By P. Sreekumaran THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The hallmark of a political party or front is its ability to turn even adversity to account. Such an opportunity has presented itself to the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala, which has been shaken to the core by the devastating defeat it has...
By Daniel Delgado NEW YORK: Trump is a billionaire president, with billionaire friends, who represents the billionaire class in the United States. Evidence of this abounds, and when it comes to Cuba, there is no clearer example than his relationship with the Fanjul family. Described by Forbes as one...
By T N Ashok The verdict from India’s sprawling five-state assembly elections of 2026 has redrawn the country’s political map with a force few had anticipated. What began as a routine electoral cycle across West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry has culminated in something far more consequential:...
By Nitya Chakraborty Karl Marx was born in Germany on May 5, 1818 and died in London on March 14, 1883. Three days after his demise on March 17, Friedrich Engels in his speech at the grave of his best friend and partner in their bid to change the...
By R. Suryamurthy The temptation, in the immediate aftermath of the 2026 assembly verdict, is to read it as a familiar story of partisan expansion and opposition decline—of one party’s geographic spread and another’s organisational fatigue. That narrative, while not entirely wrong, is analytically insufficient. It explains who gained...
By Ashok Nilakantan Ayers The first thing to get out of the way: the idea that caste “did not work” in the Tamil Nadu Assembly Elections 2026 is a bit too neat—and not entirely true. Caste didn’t vanish. It loosened. It blurred. And into that blur walked a man...
By Pradeep Kapoor LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party national President and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has to learn lessons from the defeat of TMC in Bengal assembly polls. Otherwise it would be very difficult for Samajwadi Party to put up challenge before resurgent BJP in 2027 assembly polls...
By Nitya Chakraborty The results of the five assembly elections available on Monday May 4 give unmistakeable signs of further consolidation of the BJP pan India and fresh setbacks for the opposition INDIA Bloc. Two stalwarts of the opposition Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and M. K. Stalin in...
By Dr. Gyan Pathak The results of the Legislative Assembly elections of Assam and West Bengal have just confirmed – BJP has established its political dominance in the East India scripting a new electoral history having far reaching political implications for the country. However, in the elections in South...