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The rise of V D Satheesan to Kerala’s top political office was not merely the routine selection of a Congress Legislature Party leader after an election victory. It was the culmination of a bruising internal power struggle inside the Congress, a carefully choreographed generational shift, and a rare instance where Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is learnt to have decisively outweighed the preferences of her brother Rahul Gandhi in determining the future leadership of the party in Kerala.

KOLKATA: On the night of 5th May, shortly after the declaration of the recent West Bengal Assembly election results, bulldozers and flatbed trucks rolled into the lanes around New Market and parts of Chowringhee in central Kolkata. Timber stalls were dismantled. Tarpaulin roofs were ripped away. Bamboo poles collapsed into piles of rope, plastic and broken plywood. By dawn, pavements and even stretches of motorable road that had long been swallowed by unauthorised kiosks, tarpaulin-covered stalls and makeshift commercial structures suddenly reappeared in daylight.

KOLKATA: Veterans are being roped in by Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee seeking to use their knowledge of state politics to take on the BJP occupying the Treasury benches in the Assembly and Lok Sabha. Loyalty to the party supremo and none else has been the principal criterion in choosing key members of the Trinamool Congress Legislature Party as well as the party representation in Lok Sabha.

A closer look at the just released quarterly PLFS data for last quarter of 2025-26, January-March 2026, shows that salaried employment in India remains stagnant at 25.5 per cent, while casual employment has declined to 18.7 per cent from 20.1 per cent in the first quarter April-June 2025. Self-employment has risen during this period from 54.4 per cent to 55.8 per cent, which included rise in contributing but unpaid family worker from 14.1 per cent to 14.3 per cent, and own account worker from 39 per cent to 40.7 per cent.

The Union Cabinet’s approval of a ₹37,500-crore incentive scheme for coal and lignite gasification must be understood not as an isolated industrial subsidy, nor merely as another attempt to revive India’s coal economy under a different technological vocabulary, but as part of a far larger and increasingly visible restructuring of India’s economic-security doctrine, where energy resilience, import substitution, fiscal conservatism and geopolitical risk management are beginning to merge into a single state strategy shaped by the uncomfortable realities of a fragmenting global order.

The rise of Vijay from Tamil cinema’s “Thalapathy” to Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu crossed its most decisive constitutional milestone this week when his government survived a dramatic trust vote in the Assembly with 144 MLAs backing him and only 22 voting against. In the process, Tamil Nadu may have witnessed not merely the birth of another coalition government, but the possible beginning of a post-Dravidian political transition.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Putting an end to the prolonged suspense, the Congress High Command named on Thursday Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Kerala Assembly, V. D. Satheesan as the new Chief Minister of the State.

The results of election for the five assemblies were announced on May 4. The implications are far reaching. Naturally, the challenges arising out of this new situation can be belittled only at our own peril, particularly the future of the secular democratic republic.

The Great Nicobar Island is at the centre of eight to ten billion dollar mega-infrastructure project launched in 2021 under India’s “Holistic Development of Islands” program at the southernmost tip of the country that aims to transform the island into a global transhipment and economic hub. The project also includes an international Container Transhipment Terminal, a Greenfield International Airport, a gas and thermal power complex, and an urban township that would accommodate up to 650,000 people.

Weeks preceding Assam’s one-phase Assembly election on April 9 saw chief minister and state Bharatiya Janata Party’s strongman Himanta Biswa Sarma trying to outdo even Hindi-belt party leaders in resorting to politics of polarisation and what marked him out was his direct targeting of ‘miya muslims’, a pejorative for Bengali-speaking or Bengali-origin muslims, often labelled Bangladeshis or Bengali-origin muslims. In the face of widespread condemnation of his action, Sarma did a volte face at a media meet on March 5 at Guwahati and declared that BJP did not view ‘miya muslims’ as its enemies and the party was comfortable with anyone “who loves the nation”.