Didi's BJP Phobia
Though outwardly the Trinamool Congress is putting up a brave front, insiders reveal party leaders are really worried. So what's happened now? It's Prime Minister Narendra Modi again. This time at a national convention (held on August 9) he declared that his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, will field polling officers at every polling booth in the four states that will hold elections in the next couple of years. West Bengal will hold Assembly elections in 2016, less than two years from now. And judging by the way the BJP made inroads into the vote share in the last set of elections (Parliamentary polls held earlier this year), swinging from some four percent to over sixteen percent, cutting into TMC votes and decimating the CPI-M, not to mention the already flagging-behind Congress, there is a clear trend that the people of West Bengal are looking at BJP as an alternative. Indeed, no longer is the CPI-M the main Opposition as far as Mamata Banerjee is concerned. And the Congress has ceased to be threat long ago. Now it's Didi versus Modi. And his latest words (read threat?) declaring that BJP will be present in all the booths – something even the CPI-M could not achieve – there is cause for TMC concern.
The Missing Whistleblower
The Calcutta scientist who disappeared one evening after stepping out of his house is still missing. Dr Sunil Upadhyay, chief conservation officer at the Indian Museum in Calcutta who was considered a whistleblower and crusader against alleged corruption in high places in his organisation, which deals with hundreds of crores of rupees worth of art, is untraceable since July 3. The mystery surrounding his disappearance reads like a suspense thriller with several 'motives' being attributed to it. Other than the 'silencing of a whistleblower' angle, among the other suggestions is that he had walked off on his own either because he was deeply depressed over his own name figuring in a recent case in which a priceless sculpture of the museum was damaged or because he was suffering from several medical ailments. The possibility that he was kidnapped by ruffians whom he had antagonized has also been debated.