The Earthquake That Shook Bengal. How Mamata Banerjee Lost Bengal and May Lose Her Party?
The Earthquake That Shook Bengal
About sixty of its eighty MLAs have coalesced into a rebel legislative bloc, twenty of its twenty-eight Lok Sabha MPs have written to the Speaker seeking alignment with the NDA, and even its most celebrated loyalists are issuing him-or-me ultimatums from the floor of party press conferences. The proximate lightning rod is Abhishek Banerjee, Mamata Banerjee’s nephew, heir-apparent, and the man who turned the TMC into his own private political laboratory. But the deeper pathology goes to the very marrow of how the party was constructed — not on ideology, not on institutional scaffolding, but on the cement of proximity to power and the promise of financial enrichment. Once power moved, the cement dissolved.
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TMC Split: How Mamata Banerjee Lost Bengal and May Lose Her Party
In the span of barely five weeks after its historic electoral rout in the May 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, the All India Trinamool Congress — a party synonymous for nearly three decades with one indomitable woman — stands on the precipice of a legally ratified, organisationally engineered, and politically choreographed disintegration.
Five structural forces converged to deliver this verdict: the Election Commission’s SIR-driven clean-up of voter rolls, a fierce anti-appeasement sentiment among demographic segments the TMC had taken for granted, the aftershocks of the RG Kar Medical College rape-murder case that had shattered the party’s moral standing with the urban middle class, the 7th Pay Commission promise for state government employees, and a mountain of anger accumulated over TMC’s school jobs and coal scams that had been festering through the courts for years.
The defeat was historic, but what followed was arguably more damaging. Within a month, as former Trinamool Rajya Sabha member Jawhar Sircar — perhaps the most eloquent insider-outsider observer of the TMC’s arc — told a media outlet, about sixty of the party’s eighty MLAs had staged what he characterised as a coup in the state assembly, announcing themselves as the principal opposition with a new leader, former CPI(M) figure turned TMC latecomer Ritabrata Banerjee. Twenty of the TMC’s twenty-eight Lok Sabha MPs simultaneously wrote to the Lok Sabha Speaker expressing their desire to align with the NDA, and three Rajya Sabha MPs resigned in rapid succession. In a single month, the party that Mamata Banerjee had founded in 1998, nurtured through fifteen years of grinding opposition politics, and brought to near-total dominance in 2021, appeared to be haemorrhaging its institutional existence from every artery.
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