-The Telegraph The manner in which a professor and a retired engineer were arrested and locked up for over 16 hours in Calcutta has blown the lid off a tactic increasingly being employed in Bengal to intimidate or settle scores with dissenters. The weapon of mass-scale harassment is an oft-mentioned but little-understood piece of paper called the FIR or first information report. The method is scary — a word that cropped up several...

 When Mamata Banerjee defeated the Communist Party of India (Marxist) last May after 34 years of power in West Bengal, her victory was portrayed by optiMISts as the beginning of a Kolkata Spring. Free of the communists’ rural thugs and urban heelers, the story went, the state would finally enter the 21st century. One year after Banerjee’s landslide, however, the new boss is looking a lot like the old one —...

-The Telegraph   If you are still not wearing such handcuffs in Bengal, Subha Nava Varsha and read on... Calcutta, April 13: A Jadavpur University professor and a 72-year-old retired engineer have been arrested for allegedly circulating clips of an Internet joke about chief minister Mamata Banerjee and charged with trying to outrage her modesty. Fittingly, the police crackdown got off the ground 40 minutes past the appointed hour for the dreaded midnight knock. The...

In unprecedented action, a senior professor of Jadavpur University and the secretary of a housing society in Kolkata had to spend Thursday night in jail for forwarding an e-mail that contained a cartoon featuring Trinamool Congress leaders Mamata Banerjee, Mukul Roy and Dinesh Trivedi. They were charged with defamation and outraging the modesty of a woman.   Top officers in the Kolkata police confirmed that there was no parallel in the state...

No matter where you draw the line, the fall in poverty is greater in high GDP growth years   Some plain facts and some ugly truths. The plain fact is that poverty in India has declined at a rapid pace during the UPA years post 2004. An ugly truth. When the Planning ComMISsion released the estimates of poverty in India, on the basis of the household survey conducted by the NSS in...