After a jolt to the ‘Pisi–Bhaipo’ model, can Mamata Banerjee rise again?

Kolkata: “He is no match for Abhishek,” Mamata Banerjee recently said at an election rally. She did not clarify who the ‘he’ was. But it was not lost on anyone that the jibe was for no one else but Suvendu Adhikari, as she added: “But he has always been criticising Abhishek”.

Almost a decade after she allowed her nephew Abhishek to eclipse Suvendu within Trinamool Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party used her aide-turned-adversary as the face of its Mission Bengal, which ended in a crushing defeat for her party and ended her 15-year-long rule in the state.

The BJP’s landslide victory in West Bengal on Monday was, in scale, comparable to the TMC’s own in 2011, when Mamata’s fight against the Left Front over two-and-a-half decades culminated with the end of the 34-year-long rule of the communists.

The defeat brought into sharp focus a perception that had been building over the years – of an increasingly centralised, family-centric leadership, often framed by opponents as the “Pisi–Bhaipo” (aunt-nephew) model, which the TMC supremo failed to shake off.  For a leader whose politics has been defined by confrontation, endurance, and an ability to channel public anger against entrenched power, this marks the most serious setback of her career and puts to a new test not just her leadership, but the political model she has built over decades.

Emerging within the Congress in the 1980s, Mamata established herself as one of the party’s most combative young leaders in West Bengal. She had become the most visible face against the ruling Left Front in the state, building her reputation through relentless street mobilisation, winning accolades from then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi himself.

The 1990 assault on her during a protest at Hazra crossing in Kolkata cemented her image as a combative street fighter. Her growing differences with the state leaders of the Congress, particularly over its perceived accommodation with the Left Front, led to her exit from the grand old party and the birth of the Trinamool Congress in 1998.

She converted the Singur and Nandigram movements against the acquisition of land for industries in 2006–07 into a broad-based mobilisation against the Left Front government, leading to the TMC’s landmark victory in 2011.

Her subsequent trajectory was marked by both consolidation and challenge. The TMC suffered a major setback in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as the BJP made deep inroads into the state.

But Banerjee responded with a sweeping victory in the 2021 assembly elections, decisively halting the BJP’s bid for power, although Suvendu – her trusted lieutenant – had defected to the saffron party just a few months before the polls, along with many other party leaders.

The party followed this up with a strong performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, reaffirming her continued political relevance.

Mamata built a governance model anchored in expansive welfare delivery. Schemes such as Kanyashree, Sabuj Sathi, Swasthya Sathi, and Lakshmir Bhandar created a loyal support base of the beneficiaries, particularly among women and economically vulnerable groups. But over time, the limits of this model became increasingly evident.

The most damaging factor was her failure to act on allegations of corruption within her own party and government and to contain the menace, despite a series of high-profile scandals, implicating senior party leaders, most notably the school recruitment scam.

The governance flashpoints sharpened public discontent against the ‘Pisi-Bhaipo Sarkar’ (aunt-nephew government), as manifested by the widespread outrage against the rape and murder of the young doctor at R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata.

The defeat on Monday placed Mamata’s heir apparent, Abhishek, and his ways of running the party under scrutiny. He had moved from being dismissed as a beneficiary of nepotism to emerging as the principal organisational force within the TMC, exercising control over candidate selection, campaign strategy, and party machinery – an evolution that also reflected the TMC supremo’s growing reliance on him to drive the party’s next phase.

This election was meant to consolidate that transition. But it ended up exposing the limits of a centralised model built around tight control and rapid restructuring. A large-scale overhaul of candidates, projected as a shift towards performance over patronage, disrupted entrenched local networks without necessarily replacing them with equally effective ground-level structures. This translated into weakened mobilisation in several constituencies at a time when voter discontent was already running high.

The scale of the defeat raised questions about Mamata’s mass appeal and Abhishek’s organisational approach.

More than individual controversies, it was this convergence of corruption, governance failure, and perceived centralisation that triggered public anger. Banerjee’s personal image of integrity increasingly came into tension with a political ecosystem widely seen as compromised. The absence of visible, decisive corrective action reinforced the impression that corruption had become systemic rather than exceptional.

The growing unemployment and limited industrial growth were not adequately addressed. The welfare schemes for women and youth could not compensate for the lack of jobs.

The BJP projected the election as a referendum on governance, corruption, and leadership and vanquished the TMC.

As Suvendu, whom she did not consider a match for her nephew, is set to take the helm of the state government, the way ahead for Mamata is not just going back to street politics but also winning back people’s trust in her and her party. Her career has been marked by resilience and endurance. Whether she can reinvent herself once again will determine if the defeat marks a pause or the end of the road for the stormy petrel of Bengal.