West Bengal is an Indian state in the eastern part of the country, and the only one in India with an incumbent woman Chief Minister — Mamata Banerjee.
The region, which was the political heart of the Bengal Presidency during British Rule, was divided into East and West Bengal in 1947. Bengal was a hotbed of the Indian Independence movement and has remained one of the country’s great artistic and intellectual centres, being home to Nobel laureates Rabindranath Tagore, Mother Teresa, Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee as well as freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose and Oscar winner Satyajit Ray.
Geographically, the state is happily situated with the Himalayas in the north and the Sundarbans in the south. It shares a roughly 2,200-sqkm border with Bangladesh (East Bengal at the time of Partition).
For the first 30 years, the Congress ruled Bengal, but made way for Left domination for the next 34 years. In 2011, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress — a breakaway from the Congress — came to power.
SIR has been conducted in the past, when non-BJP governments were in power and no democracy scholars were bothered about the global implications blah blah. Now, SIR was successfully completed in several states including in several opposition ruled states and no one complained. Would the author care to point out when the erosion of democracy started in WestBengal – along with the other “dimensions” of democracy as he so eloquently puts it. If he is concerned about the prospects of BJP winning in WestBengal, he should make that in simple terms and not cloak with “global implications” etc
What a baised article by Ashutosh Varshney. He is basically questioning the SIR which even Supreme Court of India has not stopped. What a lie is he spreading. I wonder how Print editorial allowed it to publish. At most it could have been a FB post or Whatsapp gossip.