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After conducting raids at various locations in West Bengal, India, the National Investigating Agency (NIA) detained two Muslims, identified as Merazuddin Ali Khan, a resident of Bokaro, and Mir Mohammed Nuruzzaman, a native of West Bengal’s Birbhum district, on Friday, March 31. As Jihad Watch stated in a preliminary report on Thursday, the arrested individuals were linked to the seizure of a massive cache of electric detonators in Birbhum in June last year.During a press conference following the arrests, the NIA representative said, “While Mir Mohammed Nuruzzaman had supplied 27,000 kg of ammonium nitrate to Rintu Sk, Merazuddin Ali Khan...

A newborn calf with just one eye is being worshipped as a god in eastern India. The little cow, whose appearance is due to a birth defect, was born in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal. In video footage shared online, the one-eyed calf, which also does not have a muzzle, can be seen sticking out its tongue and gasping for breath.

KOLKATA, India — When Sonali Mehrotra realized that a hulking overpass would come within arm’s length of her third-floor balcony, she took refuge in black humor, telling relatives to look at the bright side: Instead of lugging suitcases up the stairs when they came to visit, they could toss them into a bedroom as they drove in from the airport. Anyway, work on the overpass occurred so sporadically — generally, when elections were coming — that a project originally promised in 18 months was unfinished after seven years. At this rate, she joked, the project might not be completed in...

Poll rout leaves India's communists in limbo AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE KOLKATA, May 13: The Indian state of West Bengal said goodbye Friday to three decades of uninterrupted rule by the world´s longest-serving, democratically elected communist government. Early results from state polls made it clear that the Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI-M, had been swept aside in a landslide that marks the end of an era in India´s modern politics. The victor was the Trinamool Congress Party of firebrand national railways minister Mamata Banerjee, the largest ally of the Congress Party in the federal...

NEW DELHI — Tagged as the world's most electorally successful Communist party, the Marxist leaders of West Bengal might finally be nearing the end of more than three decades of uninterrupted power. The Communist Party of Indian (Marxist), or CPI-M, which has won every election in the eastern Indian state since 1977, is suddenly fighting for survival after suffering a crushing defeat in municipal elections last week. The party's nemesis is India's mercurial Railways Minister Mamata Banerjee, who heads the Trinamul Congress, a relatively new regional party intent on ending the Communists' long-running monopoly on power in West Bengal. "For...

At least 40 people have been injured in religious clashes on a remote delta island in India's eastern state of West Bengal, police say. Fifteen of those injured in the clashes on Sagar island, at the confluence of the Ganges and the sea, were policemen. Supporters of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS) and local Muslim villagers clashed after the RSS set up a camp in the area. This caused unease amongst Muslims, who have a large population on the island. The RSS is active throughout India and is the ideological fountainhead of India's main opposition party Bharatiya Janata Party...

From the landmines near Tirupati which Naxalites used to try and assassinate Andhra chief minister Chandrababu Naidu to the Dalgaon tea estate in North Bengal where tea garden workers trained under the Marxists turned against their own leader, the Left’s perpetrators of violence are facing a backlash. The 14 lives lost in the Best Bakery case became a campaign issue for months, whereas the 19 lives lost at Dalgaon have been dismissed as mere statistics? The most glaring case of Marxist violence took place way back on April 30, 1982, when 17 monks of the Ananda Marg sect were lynched...

As the chief minister of one of the world's last communist governments, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is determined not to give in to loneliness. Instead he points to a resurgent China and what he sees as the inherent contradictions of a world dominated by the United States as evidence that socialism will rise again. "We are fighting an opposite current. The opposite current is very powerful. But this cannot be the last word," he told Reuters. "Contradictions are bound to start." Bhattacharjee heads the world's longest-serving democratically elected communist government, which has run the Indian state of West Bengal for the last...

Kolkata, July 21 (IANS) Police have arrested a man for beheading a 13-year-old boy and offering his blood to an occult deity in a West Bengal village. The gruesome incident took place on Friday at Dararkandi village in the central district of Murshidabad, some 200 km from here, police said Sunday. According to district police official Gautam Banerjee, the culprit, identified as Pintu, had been arrested. "He has confessed to killing Rezaul Karim." Pintu said he practiced black magic and wanted to acquire mystical powers. He had been advised by a sorcerer to sacrifice a young boy for the purpose....