With the West Bengal Assembly elections barely a month away, political temperatures have risen in north Bengal after Rajbanshi leader and BJP Rajya Sabha MP Ananta Maharaj accepted the Banga Bibhushan award from Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee last week and shared the stage with her, setting off fresh speculation. Maharaj, whose real name is Nagendra…
With the Union Cabinet approving the renaming of Kerala as Keralam on Tuesday, the demand, previously endorsed twice by the Kerala Assembly, is finally set to be fulfilled. The Assembly passed resolutions in 2023 and 2024 urging the Union government to amend the Constitution and change the state’s name from Kerala to Keralam. Both resolutions…
5 min readFeb 24, 2026 12:16 PM IST First published on: Feb 24, 2026 at 11:59 AM IST Days after a political row was sparked over the shirtless protest by Indian Youth Congress (IYC) workers at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, the police on Tuesday morning arrested IYC national president Uday Bhanu Chib,…
(As West Bengal gears up for the Assembly polls, every Tuesday, The Indian Express’s Kolkata bureau chief Ravik Bhattacharya decodes the electoral trends, political signals, and campaign moves shaping the contest.) Having steadily lost ground in West Bengal since being voted out of power in 2011, the CPI(M), over the past five years, made a…
Electoral statistics at his fingertips, knowledge of the ins and outs in all of West Bengal’s 294 Assembly constituencies in an instant, and the ability to recall obscure details at will. These abilities are what set apart Mukul Roy apart from other political leaders and helped him turn the Trinamool Congress (TMC) into a dominant…
3 min readNew DelhiFeb 23, 2026 07:48 PM IST First published on: Feb 23, 2026 at 07:29 PM IST The great grandson of the first Indian Governor General C Rajagopalachari, C R Kesavan is a national spokesperson of the BJP at present. He speaks to The Indian Express about the installation of his great grandfather’s…
While the ruling NDA looks set to clinch four seats out of five in Bihar in the March 16 Rajya Sabha elections, the opposition RJD-led alliance is hoping to wrest at least one. The contest for the fifth seat hinges on numbers. Each candidate requires 41 votes to win. Considering its strength of 202 MLAs…
A political storm is brewing in Telangana’s Kamareddy over 268 acres of land, with the Congress alleging that the BJP facilitated the illegal transfer of government land to an RSS-run school, Saraswati Shishu Mandir. The controversy has pitted senior leaders from both parties against each other — Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy’s advisor and…
With Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing that a statue of British architect Edwin Landseer Lutyens would be replaced by one of C Rajagopalachari — the first Indian occupant of Rashtrapati Bhavan as the first Indian governor general from June 1948 to January 1950 — in a bid to move towards freedom from a “mentality of…
When Congress general secretary (organisation) K C Venugopal arrived at Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin’s Alwarpet residence on Sunday night, the optics suggested escalation. But inside the meeting, according to top DMK and Tamil Nadu Congress sources, the emphasis shifted. Instead of pressing the power-sharing demand that had triggered friction in recent weeks,…