Pallab Bhattacharya

The biggest political challenge that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government faces right now is the agitation on the outskirts of Delhi by farmers coming mainly from Punjab, Haryana and western part of Uttar Pradesh.

Water sharing and management of trans-boundary rivers will dominate today’s Bangladesh-India summit to be led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, said officials.

The death of legendary Soumitra Chatterjee yesterday brought an end to the last link of the golden era of Bangalee actors, led by the incomparable Uttam Kumar.

Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman yesterday announced a fresh stimulus package totalling Rs 265,080 crore for the Covid-19-battered national economy, including a new job creation scheme by giving subsidy to those establishments that make new hires.

The Bangladesh football team captain Jamal Bhuiyan said he enjoys a healthy rivalry with the Indian team in the international arena and feels a special motivation when it comes to playing against India.

China loomed large over the in-person visit of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Mark T Esper to New Delhi on October 26-27.

The latest country-wise economic growth projection dished out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for financial year 2020-21 has made headlines in India as much for its forecast of a double-digit contraction of the three-trillion-dollar Indian economy, Asia’s third largest, as for predicting that Bangladesh would overtake India in terms of US dollar-denominated real per capita GDP.

India’s main opposition Congress party seems to have shaken off the stupor of a disastrous performance in Lok Sabha elections in May last year and a debilitating internal feud as Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra hit the streets on October 2, to protest against the brutal assault and alleged rape of a Dalit teenager by upper-caste men in Uttar Pradesh and her cremation in the dead of night.

Dhaka may give a fresh push for water-sharing deals of Teesta and other common rivers during the Bangladesh-India Joint Consultative Commission (JCC) meeting scheduled to be held today.

When India imposed a ban on onion export on September 14 this year to check its soaring price in the domestic market, the criticism of the government’s action, mainly from farmers, was louder than it was less than a year ago when the same prohibition had gone into force.

On September 21, India and China held their sixth and latest round of talks to tamp down tensions along their unresolved border in Ladakh.

Seldom has a Bengali actress of Bollywood roiled the politics of three Indian states—Bihar, Maharashtra and West Bengal—for contrasting reasons.

The more things change in India’s main opposition party Congress, the more they seem to remain the same. This was the most important takeaway from the party’s interim President Sonia Gandhi when she carried out a major organisational reshuffle on September 11.

A major disappointment in the public life of India’s first Bengali President Pranab Mukherjee, who died on August 31, 2020, was that he could never contest and win direct elections to parliament, which would have helped him shed the tag his critics gave him: “a politician without a mass base and following.”

The inland waterways on the Sonamura-Daudkandi route that connects Tripura to Bangladesh will have its first trial run in the first week of September when barges carry 50 tonnes of cement across the canal, according to Biplab Kumar Deb, the chief minister of Tripura.

Twenty-five Bangladeshi fishermen from Kurigram, stuck in an Assam jail for two months without trial, have little hope of returning home soon while another already has died in custody.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) yesterday suspended this year’s Indian Premier League “till further notice” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic which has claimed more than 400 lives and affected over 12,000 in the country.

An array of artistes from across the world will appear in ‘One World: Together At Home’, a global virtual concert, curated by pop star Lady Gaga to support and applaud frontline healthcare workers in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

“Extraordinary times require extraordinary solutions”—that is how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi summed up the worldwide response to the coronavirus pandemic during a video conference on March 30 with the heads of all of India’s embassies and high commissions across the globe.

On Sunday, Salman Islam, a resident of the capital’s Panthapath area, rushed to the nearest pharmacy to buy malaria drug hydroxychloroquine after watching on the news that the US President Donald Trump touted it for treatment of Covid-19.