The Unravelling of the Trinamool

For nearly three decades, Mamata Banerjee appeared politically unassailable. She ended the Left Front's 34-year rule, built the Trinamool Congress into Bengal's dominant political force and emerged as one of India's most formidable regional leaders. Then came May 4. As the assembly election results poured in, the Trinamool Congress was decimated, Mamata Banerjee lost her own seat, and the Bharatiya Janata Party swept to power with 207 seats in the 294-member House. Yet the bigger story was not the BJP's victory, but the scale of the TMC's collapse to just 80 seats.

Then came the shocker: a list of 20 MPs was released on Friday morning, confirming speculation about a split. Mamata’s faction in the Lok Sabha now has only eight members, with 20 others sending a letter to Speaker Om Birla asking to be treated as a separate bloc. The letter dated May 18 surfaced only on June 12.Three TMC Rajya Sabha MPs have resigned this week. Meanwhile, Ritabrata Banerjee had split the TMC legislative party in the West Bengal assembly, securing the support of 60 MLAs. Assembly Speaker Rathindra Bose approved his election as Leader of the Opposition on June 3.

In a month’s time, Mamata Banerjee, the unassailable West Bengal Chief Minister, has been reduced to a political pauper. Even the leftover loyalists are asking her to choose between them and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee, who is being blamed for all that has gone wrong with the TMC. Abhishek, better known as bhaipo (brother’s son in Bengali), is Mamata’s nephew, heir apparent and de facto No. 2, who ran the party and the government, revelling in an obscene display of power — he was seen crisscrossing the state in a convoy of 37 vehicles.

Mamata, in her distress, has rushed into Sonia Gandhi’s arms. The picture spoke volumes about the possibility of a merger between two parties that needed each other. Had Mamata embraced the Congress and the Left in a pre-poll alliance, the TMC might still have been in power. In a winner-takes-all game of political poker, Mamata wanted to crush her INDIA bloc allies, leaving no room for the Congress and the Left.

And the result: the BJP won two-thirds of the seats with 45.8% of the vote, whereas the TMC, the Congress and the Left, with a combined vote share of 48.5%, have only 83 seats. This seven-time parliamentarian and three-time Chief Minister, who put an end to the 34-year rule of the Left Front, has lost her legislative party and parliamentary party to rebels, obviously supported by the BJP. 

Mamata floated the TMC on January 1, 1998, after leaving the Congress the previous month. Within a year, she was Railways Minister in Vajpayee’s Cabinet.

As someone with uncanny political timing, Mamata shifted loyalties until she achieved what she set out to do. She used the BJP as a prop to make space for herself, but left the NDA to tie up with the Congress and was again the Railways Minister in 2009 in the UPA government. And in 2011, with Congress’s help, she unseated the CPI (M)-led Left Front. She had no qualms about holding hands with Maoists during her protests in Singur and Nandigram. But she ruthlessly mowed down the Maoists after coming to power and within six months, in November 2011, Maoist leader Kishenji was shot dead in a spectacular anti-Maoist operation.

The biggest political lesson she learned while shifting from the BJP-led NDA to the Congress-led UPA was about the primacy of the Muslim vote bank in West Bengal politics. Muslims make up around 30% of the population, and the community tends to vote en bloc for a party that they deem capable of protecting their interests. In 2011, Mamata became a beneficiary when the community shifted its allegiance away from CPI(M) after the sensational murder of Rizwanur Rahim and the violence and police firing against farmers of Nandigram.

The severe anti-incumbency arising from three terms, or 15 years, in office, marked by a failure to generate jobs, stem the migration of poor unskilled workers, and inability to create prosperity, combined with the arrogance of power, proved her undoing. Yet, it was difficult for Bengal to turn saffron. While the TMC, the Congress and the Left have attributed the BJP’s victory to the deletion of votes in the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls, the TMC’s defeat is beyond doubt its own making.

Then there was a geopolitical factor that contributed to the BJP’s victory, the real impact of which is yet to be analysed. From Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Direct Action Day riots on August 16, 1946, the memory of communal violence is etched in Bengal’s psyche. Partition brought its woes and refugees. Then came the genocide of 1971, with three million dead and over 10 million refugees flooding into West Bengal and the Northeast. Yet, the BJP or its precursors could never reap an electoral harvest of communal hatred or create a Hindu vote bank over these decades.

What helped the BJP this time around was the deterioration in minority security under Muhammed Yunus, who was foisted as Chief Adviser of Bangladesh after the elected Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was deposed in a youth uprising in August 2024. Within months, there were widespread attacks on Hindus and other minorities across Bangladesh, prompting some victims to flee to West Bengal. The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council in a press release early this year enumerated 2,184 instances of communal violence in just four months after Yunus took power and then 522 more such instances in 2025.

Unlike in the past, most of these killings, abductions, rapes, vandalism of places of worship, extortion and occupation of property were video-recorded and played over and over on mobile handsets across West Bengal. These video reels did what the Hindu Maha Sabha, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh or the BJP could not do — to polarise Hindus and create a vote bank. Religious polarisation added fuel to the anti-incumbency fire that singed an unsuspecting Mamata, who was still wooing Muslim voters as usual. In fact, even the Muslim vote is split over anger against Mamata and Bhaipo.

Yet Mamata is a street fighter. In 2004, she was the lone MP from her party, which held no power anywhere, not even in a gram panchayat. Yet she clawed her way back to success. Now, neither age nor her choice of successor favours her. But Mamata can never be ruled out. If the TMC merges with the Congress, it could indeed strengthen the Opposition and open new possibilities and political space for Mamata.