Harsimrat seeks PM's intervention on Chandigarh's cadre issue
Chandigarh, Oct 3 : Union Minister and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Wednesday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to intervene in the issue of changes being made to the 60:40 ratio of drawing staff and officers for Chandigarh, from Punjab and Haryana respectively.
Urging the Prime Minister to put an end to the violations by successive governments of the commitments and decisions regarding the administrative staff of Chandigarh being drawn from Punjab and Haryana on a 60:40 ratio, pending its transfer to Punjab, Harsimrat on Wednesday handed over a letter to the Prime Minister on behalf of the SAD.
The letter specifically flagged the issue of merger of the post of the DSP (deputy superintendent of police) with the UT (union territory) cadre and requested the Prime Minister to get this undone, a SAD spokesman said here.
It also sought a review and revocation of all other acts in violation of decisions and assurances on the appointment of officers and officials in Chandigarh, the spokesman said.
"The PM expressed surprise over the merger with UT cadre of posts meant for Punjab and assured her that necessary steps in this regard would be expeditiously taken. Badal expressed satisfaction regarding the very positive and helpful response of the Prime Minister on this issue," the spokesman added.
SAD President Sukhbir Singh Badal also expressed his strong resentment over the dilution of Punjab's rights in the UT of Chandigarh by successive Congress governments.
"There is no such thing as UT cadre in Chandigarh. This is an artificial and fabricated bureaucratic manipulation and it flies in the face of the fact that Chandigarh belongs to Punjab and is being administered on its behalf through the 60:40 formula, pending its transfer (to Punjab)," he said in a statement here.
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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.
