The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. Exit polls predict a Bharatiya Janata Party win in Assam, while the Trinamool Congress is slated to retain West Bengal. The Left is expected to win Kerala back and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam could return to power in Tamil Nadu.
2. The minor girl who was allegedly molested by a soldier in Jammu and Kashmir's Handwara town now says she was pressured by the police to keep the army's name out of it.
3. There was speculation on Monday that Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel, whose government has been besieged by the Patidar quota protests, will be replaced by the BJP.
The Big Story: Didi returns
One of the many stories emerging from the exit polls is the return of the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. While other states are slated to see a change in government, largely due to anti-incumbency, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will probably breeze into a second term. the poll of polls suggest the TMC will retain the robust majority it won in 2011, keeping 184 sets in an assembly of 294. The Left-Congress combine was given 103 seats while the BJP is predicted to win only five. These are handsome results for a government that has shown few obvious signs of making good on the promises that it made five years ago. But then, in a state where the opposition was all but decimated, a Trinamool victory seems fated.
In 2011, Banerjee brought down the longest-running democratically elected communist government in the world. The Left Front, which ruled Bengal for 34 years, functioned through a formidably well-oiled party machinery and party control over all institutions of the state. While the foot soldiers of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) ranged the countryside, holding sway through violence and bullying, the senior leadership kept a firm grip on the police, the state's educational institutions and various arms of the bureaucracy.
With the defeat of 2011, the carefully built Left fortress was shattered, its cadres defected en masse to the Trinamool, and the new ruling party took up the ways of the old. Till last year, the Left seemed unable to regroup its forces and the Trinamool swept both Lok Sabha and local polls. The uneasy alliance with the Congress was too little too late.
The Trinamool would also have the BJP to thank if it won. Ever since 2014, the saffron party had become the more vocal opposition in the state, clashes between Trinamool and BJP workers became increasingly common, and the politics of polarisation seemed to be on the rise in certain pockets of the state. But for all the BJP's sound and fury, exit polls would suggest, it has not been able to connect with voters. In the end, the Trinamool seems likely to return to Bengal because no other party was able to come up with a winning idea.
The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the day's big story
Shoaib Danyal on how the Left-Congress alliance showed a strain in Murshidabad and how rural development helped the TMC get past the ghost of the Tata Nano plant disaster in Singur.
Politicking and policying
1. Courts cannot substitute the executive, reiterates Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.
2. Rahul Gandhi is expected to be Congress president in 2016, says senior party leader Jairam Ramesh.
3. The National Democratic Alliance will announce its new education policy before it finishes two years in office on May 26, announces Human Resources Development Minister Smriti Irani.
4. Chennai, still recovering from the December floods, recorded the lowest voter turnout in Tamil Nadu on Tuesday.
Punditry
1. In the Indian Express, Rekha Sharma on the manufactured controversy around whether citizens should chant "Bharat Mata Ki Jai".
2. In the Hindu, Mohit Rao on Bangladeshi bloggers in exile in Europe but still pursued by the threats that drive them out of their country.
3. In the Telegraph, Kanwal Sibal on how India has not held China to account for blocking its moves and protecting Pakistan in the 1267 United Nations sanctions committee.
Don't Miss...
Mrinal Pande recounts how, long before weather satellites and crop science, farmers in the Hindi belt turned to the poetry of Gagh for agricultural advice:
As an astronomer and agricultural guru, Ghagh was engaged in a struggle for exactitude – for a language free of Sanskrit punditry to discuss crop cycles, seeds, various tips for buying healthy cattle, and sound reflections on vagaries of both man and nature, all without scientific meteorological systems and instruments. His poems still remain invisible pathways for illiterate villagers to understand the world around them. It enables them to access pragmatic tips to read the signs for a good crop year or a bad one.
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