Kolkata: Reminding the Election Commission of a citizen’s fundamental right to liberty, the Calcutta High Court on Tuesday asked it not to resort to preventive detention and arrests unless essential and only when done legally.Disposing of a writ petition against the alleged illegal pre-poll detention of Trinamool workers and councillors, the high court said it…
Singur: As the morning mist settles over lush green patches of Hooghly, the rhythmic sound of tillers in Singur is punctuated by the loud, competing echoes of campaign microphones. As this historic semi-rural constituency — once at the centre of political upheaval in Bengal — heads to the polls, Singur remains a landscape defined by…
Kolkata: Nearly 55 nuns in the Missionaries of Charity (MC), an order formed by Saint Teresa of Calcutta and headquartered in Kolkata, have been included in the supplementary list published on Tuesday after the tribunal cleared their cases. The MC had written to the Election Commission (EC) after many names and the nuns had moved…
Kolkata: A physician who lives in Paris but visits Kolkata with his family at least once a year, has flown down to vote on Wednesday. A firm believer in the paradox ‘change is the only constant’, he voted for a change in 2011 when the Trinamool won a decisive mandate to overthrow the Left govt…
Kolkata: Of 4,200 residents of Sonagachhi, Asia’s largest red-light district, 1,300 were deleted from the poll roll, bolstering the argument that a large number of socially and economically deprived women failed to make the SIR cut.During judicial adjudication, cases for 850 women from Sonagachhi were heard. All but one were rejected. The deletions occurred despite…
Kolkata: As the sun beat down, Munsi Rezaul Karim boarded a Khanakul-bound bus on Tuesday, armed with an appointment letter from EC, assigning him to Booth 140A at Basantapur Prathamik Vidyalaya as the third polling officer.What would have been a routine civic duty turned out to be a strange one this year. The EC may…
Kolkata: Several Indian citizens living in the city for generations had knocked on the door of the tribunal appellate authority when the SIR, conducted by the Election Commission, struck their names off the electoral roll. A judicial scrutiny later, when a number of them still found their names missing from the inclusion list issued on…
Kolkata: Lucky electors, whose appeals for restoration of their voting rights were cleared by the tribunals, felt they had a “much bigger responsibility” now as they could finally be able to vote despite the initial hurdles. In the previous elections, some of them had skipped voting but this time, they said, they would definitely vote…
Kolkata: As the city votes on Wednesday, the Kolkata Police Dog Squad has already deployed its newest members — Ina, Tina, Snoopy and Moon — to secure the city’s high-stakes political landscape. The four labradors, recently designated as “explosive experts”, transitioned directly from rigorous training to the frontline of VIP security and rally ground sanitisation.According…
Kolkata: A ‘Singham’ versus ‘Pushpa’ rivalry played out at Falta, around 40km from Kolkata, on Tuesday.On Monday, IPS officer and DIG Ajay Pal Sharma — an ‘encounter specialist’ popularly known as ‘Singham’ on his home turf in UP, visited the house of Falta’s Trinamool candidate Jahangir Khan and warned his kin “to be cautious”. A…
