Rupee gains 2 paise to 91.62 against US dollar in early trade
Mumbai (PTI): The rupee stayed firm and gained 2 paise to 91.62 against the US dollar on Friday after the US announced a 30-day waiver for Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil, easing pressure on the global energy flow amid the ongoing war in West Asia.
Forex traders said that the negative domestic equity markets and withdrawal of foreign funds resisted the rupee's upward move despite a retreating American currency.
Amid the escalating war involving the US, Israel and Iran, the American administration has announced a temporary 30-day waiver to allow Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday said that "this stop-gap measure will alleviate pressure caused by Iran's attempt to take global energy hostage".
At the interbank foreign exchange market, the rupee opened at its previous session's closing level of 91.64 and gained 2 paise to 91.62 against the greenback.
The Indian currency recovered 41 paise to settle at 91.64 against the dollar on Thursday after losing 97 paise in the preceding two sessions.
Meanwhile, the dollar index, which gauges the greenback's strength against a basket of six currencies, was trading 0.37 per cent lower at 98.94.
Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, was down 1.05 per cent at USD 84.51 per barrel in futures trade.
On the domestic equity market front, the Sensex lost 388.23 points or 0.49 per cent to 79,627.67, while Nifty fell 118.30 points or 0.48 per cent to 24,647.60 in early trade.
Foreign institutional investors sold equities worth Rs 3,752.52 crore on a net basis on Thursday, according to exchange data.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
