Pallab Bhattacharya

The Pegasus spyware controversy has set off a political storm in India. Sustained anti-government protests by the opposition on the floor of the House paralysed almost the entire first week of the monsoon session of Parliament from July 19.

“The future of Afghanistan cannot be its past,” India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had told a meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on July 14. It is precisely the spectre of a rerun of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 that has been firmly raised with its swift military surge across much of that country in the last few months.

Over two months after the state assembly elections, which saw Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) returning to power with a thumping majority and its principal rival Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) making substantial gains in terms of seats, the political landscape in the state is set to be roiled once again on a range of issues.    

On July 6, the Indian government came out with the announcement of a separate Ministry of Cooperation with the avowed aim of realising the vision of “Sahkar se Samriddhi” (“Progress Through Cooperation”).

Politics, particularly electoral politics, in India is as much about public perception as about the quality of governance. This comes out quite clearly in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s major expansion of his council of ministers and reshuffle of portfolios on Wednesday night.

In May this year, India's veteran tribal rights activist Stan Swamy had told the Bombay High Court—where he was being tried after being arrested under the stringent anti-terror law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, or UAPA, for his alleged links with Maoists—that he would die if "things were to go on this way".

India today got Asia’s longest high-speed track for testing automobiles including high-end cars.

On June 8, South Asia acquired a rare salience at the United Nations after the Maldives Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid was elected as the new President of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) for a one-year term beginning in September.

Much has been written about the flawed and controversial National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the northeastern Indian state of Assam and the mammoth humanitarian crisis that it has triggered.

Two orders given by India’s Supreme Court in two separate cases early this month have, once again, brought into sharp focus the issue of the colonial-era law relating to sedition in the context of media freedom. Both cases involve journalists and their reporting.

A day after their arrest in the Narada bribery case, two senior ministers of West Bengal and a Trinamool Congress leader are set to appeal the Calcutta High Court’s stay on their bail granted by a court in Kolkata.

The Calcutta High Court last night stayed the bail granted by a trial court to two senior West Bengal Ministers Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee, and ruling TMC legislator Madan Mitra and former Kolkata Mayor Sovan Chatterjee.

Seldom does an assembly or Lok Sabha election in any Indian state arouse as much interest among the people across the country’s border as in Bangladesh. The results of the recent assembly polls in West Bengal and Assam were keenly watched in India’s eastern neighbour. The interest in West Bengal was, understandably, much greater given the powerful linguistic and cultural connections between the state and Bangladesh.

As much of the world continues to reel under the coronavirus crisis, there is an increasingly frantic scramble for more and more vaccines in countries seeking to protect their people against the disease.

“Films cannot change society. They never have. Show me a film that changed society or brought about any change,” said master director Satyajit Ray in an interview for the American magazine Cineaste more than three decades ago.

Ruling Bharatiya Janata Party created history in the north eastern Indian state of Assam by becoming the first non-Congress party to win two successive terms in the state assembly elections there.

It may be too early to tell, but the signs seem promising for Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee.

Bangla nijer meyer kachei thaaklo (Bengal has stayed with its own daughter). When Trinamool Congress (TMC) came out with the slogan “Bangla nijer meyekay chai” in February, it could not have been more prophetic.

The landslide victory of Mamata Banerjee has not only thwarted the Modi wave that has swept over India but also relegated the Left and Congress to a footnote in West Bengal polls.

Mamata Banerjee lost her seat in the high-stakes Nandigram assembly, but the charismatic Trinamool Congress supremo brought her party to power in West Bengal for the third time in a row.