-The Hindu Mamata Banerjee’s assumption that Bengali nationalism could block anti-incumbency and Hindutva may be optimistic The Trinamool Congress (TMC) government in West Bengal is a unique specimen in understanding anti-incumbency. Welfare schemes that usually make incumbents popular have added to the anti-incumbency woes of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, as the workers of her party made those the easy and only option for rent-seeking. ‘Cut money’, or the cut for TMC local...

-The Hindu Labourers from West Bengal, Assam have gone home to exercise their franchise Kochi: Kabir Ahmad (name changed), a migrant worker in Perumbavoor, had to spend a small fortune on a flight ticket to return home to Hojai district of Assam last month following his parents’ anguished plea to get back in time for voting. Their desperation was borne out of the perceived danger posed to the community by the National...

-Scroll.in The teenager had requested to be sent to Bangladesh instead of Myanmar as her parents lived there. Myanmar on Thursday refused to allow entry to a 14-year-old Rohingya girl who was taken to a border town for deportation by Indian authorities, citing inappropriate circumstances, the Hindustan Times reported. Had the process been completed, the girl would have been the first Rohingya national to be deported after the Myanmar military staged a coup...

-The Hindu Over 19 lakh of the 3.29 crore applicants were left out of the final register that took five years to compile. The Centre has asked the Assam Government that “rejection slips” to those excluded from the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) published in 2019 shall be issued immediately. More than 19 lakh of the 3.29 crore applicants in Assam were left out of the final register that took five years...

-The Statesman Assembly elections in the States of Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and the Union Territory of Puducherry to be held between 27 March and 29 April come at a time the prestigious US-based Freedom House report has lowered India’s rank from a “free” to a “partially free” country and Sweden’s V-Dem Institute which once described India as the world’s largest democracy as an “electoral autocracy.” The government can either...