Word: bengal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...expected to increase as rescue workers gain access to more isolated areas. Low-lying Bangladesh is regularly gutted by cyclones in the spring and fall, which precede and follow its monsoon season. Aila also hit Sundarbans, a mangrove forest on the India-Bangladesh border that shelters endangered royal Bengal tigers--some of which have also been stranded by the waters...
...good news is that Indian voters are starting to raise their expectations. In rural West Bengal last fall, I met a man whose biggest complaint was that his village had no electricity. His children had no light to study under in the evenings, and he had to buy expensive diesel for a generator to charge his mobile phone. He wasn't simply deprived; he was angry because he knew exactly what he was missing. Cell phones and cable television have brought not just political advertising to poor and rural areas but also new aspirations and a more acute awareness...
...down at passers-by from banners strung up over palm trees or street-corner billboards, accompanied by the less-hallowed visages of local comrades. India's Communists have been key players in the hurly burly of the world's largest democracy, dominating the ballot box in states like West Bengal, where Kolkata is the capital, and where a Communist government has ruled for over thirty years. But this month's national elections, won decisively by the ruling Congress-led government, has plunged India's left-wing into crisis. (Read about the key players to emerge from India's elections...
...national" political parties of India, along with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the ruling Congress party. Competing for 130 seats, they only won 20, losing more than half their seats in the 543-seat lower house and suffering particularly costly setbacks in their strongholds of West Bengal and Kerala. In the last government, the Communists and their allies - known collectively as the Left Front - were an influential part of the ruling coalition. Now they have been relegated to the fringes of Parliament. "This necessitates action and rethinking," said Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party...
...Things are likely to get worse for India's Communists before they get better. Their defeats stem in part from a record of poor governance in the states where they draw most of their support; in West Bengal, a move by the ruling Communists to take land from peasants for private industrial projects led to a voter backlash in May's elections. Party insiders expect the outcome of state assembly elections in 2011 will end their already thin grip on power, and a growing schism between CPI-M politicians pushing for capitalist reforms and the more orthodox intellectual elite...