Mamata Banerjee

However, at the meeting, the goddess's image on the background hoarding had 11 arms.

Taking a swipe at the BJP government, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress said the repeated mishandling of Bengal's cultural traditions is deeply insulting.

[intro jingle] Meanwhile, on 3rd September, Jamnagar police informed the Indian banks Ranjit Sagar Road branch that they believed gold jewelry worth seven lakhs of rupees had been stolen from its lockers.

The bank officials were in disbelief since the vault containing the lockers requires a two-person authorization for access.

It is not a BJP-only process, mechanism.

All parties are actually resorting to that, from Mamata Banerjee to TVK to Congress to Shiva Sena to RGD.

Everybody does the same set of promise with minor variations in, okay, whether 500 rupees there, extra or 500 rupees less.

So you are no longer talking about... through employment generation of any kind because that does not fit into the idea of the model that capitalism has evolved into from manufacturing driven mass employment, capitalism and other things.

And this next story requires a much more measured approach.

According to the Indian Express, Bristi Mukherjee, the 28-year-old niece of former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, was found hanging in her home in Burbham District.

It's just awful news.

The initial assessment by the police is that they suspect suicide, though they are thoroughly examining all possibilities.

So they departed from typical common law principles, uh, in the case of injuries to say, you know, we will compensate dependents of these women because the work that women were doing in the home actually, uh, is valuable and it should be treated on par with an occupation.

So the, as you can see, there have been many false starts, but what the consistent, uh, thread that runs through the, uh, you know, the independence period, the post-independence period, and most recently in the articulations of certain politicians, for example, Mamata Banerjee, who literally, uh, articulates the wages for housework thinking to say that this is the-- and the notification for the Tamil Nadu state.

So we see that, you know, this has been a consistent theme in Indian thinking and, uh, therefore, finally we find there is in fact economic recognition of women's unpaid work, uh, uh, after several years of, uh, and decades of thinking about it.

We'll get to the electoral politics side of it once again, but before that, I wanted to touch upon the pushback from a section of feminists against cash transfers.

So of course, my chapter was, uh, you know, finalized before the election outcomes of twenty twenty-six.

Uh, so I had occasion to really study in great depth, uh, you know, what the sub-national welfare regime of West Bengal was.

And of course, having a chief minister like, uh, Mamata Banerjee, I mean, what is very interesting, I think, uh, you know, she's of course a complex figure, but her, uh, thinking around welfare is explicitly feminist.

That's my, uh, argument in the book.