Mamata vs Abhishek: A real tussle for control, or just a stage show?

“The transport department has turned into a silent department,” Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee sneered at an administrative review meeting at ‘Nabanna’ – the seat of the state government of West Bengal – on January 2.

“Have you ever made a surprise visit to the bus stops to learn about the problem of the commuters due to the lack of enough buses?” she asked the state’s transport minister Snehasish Chakraborty as other ministers and officials looked on.

Chakraborty’s mumbles in his defence were drowned in the Trinamool Congress supremo’s dismissive retorts.

The chief minister then turned to the education minister Bratya Basu and chided him for planning to introduce the semester system in the primary schools. “I read it in the newspapers. How can you make such a policy decision without consulting us?” she asked him, before nixing the plan. “We are trying to lower the burden on the children, not to raise it.”

The way Mamata put Chakraborty and Bratya on the firing line in an administrative review meeting live streamed by several TV and web channels has set the tongues wagging within the ruling Trinamool Congress, with many linking her outbursts with the ‘Prabin’ versus ‘Nabin’ conflict within the ruling party – the conflict, which has the veterans owing allegiance to the supremo on one side and the gen-next leaders like Basu and Chakraborty, both known to be loyal to her nephew and the party general secretary Abhishek Bandopadhyay, on the other side.

The buzz about the ‘cold war’ between Mamata and Abhishek has long been making the rounds in the political circles in West Bengal.

It made its latest comeback after some of West Bengal’s celebrity artists, who had been on the frontline of the protest against the state’s TMC government in the wake of the August 9, 2024, rape and murder of a young doctor in a hospital, alleged that their performances in the cultural events held around the New Year Day had been cancelled, apparently at the behest of the leaders of the ruling party.

Kunal Ghosh, a senior leader and the spokesperson of the TMC, went on X to call for boycotting some artists, whom he accused of running a smear campaign against the state’s chief minister and the ruling party in the name of protesting against the rape and murder of the young doctor.

Abhishek, however, dismissed the call for the boycott the next day itself, stressing that everyone has the right to protest freely in West Bengal and that was what made the state different from Uttar Pradesh where the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power.

In what appeared to be a snub to Ghosh, a former Rajya Sabha member, Abhishek also stressed that no one on behalf of the party’s supreme leader or himself had called for the boycott. Ghosh stood his ground and responded on X stating that he would take whatever Mamata would say as the last word on the issue as she was the one who had been at the receiving end of the most vicious campaigning during the protests against the rape and murder of the doctor.

The TMC also recently suspended the party’s former Rajya Sabha member, Shantanu Sen, who was also known to be close to Abhishek.

The doctor-turned-politician irked the party leadership with his comments supporting the protests, which had singed the party for several weeks last year. Sen was suspended just days after he played a key role in launching ‘Sevashraya’ – a series of camps to provide medical care to people in Diamond Harbour, Abhishek's Lok Sabha constituency.

The TMC had in November last year also issued a show-cause notice to legislator Humayun Kabir. He had demanded that Abhishek should be inducted as a minister in the state government and given the home portfolio. He had also publicly expressed doubts if the TMC veterans around Mamata really wished well for her and the party.

Abhishek – often referred to as ‘Senapati’ (Commander of the Army) within the TMC – generally maintained silence during the protests against the rape and murder of the doctor, except for a few posts on X, denouncing the heinous crime and expressing solidarity with the agitators, who primarily targeted the government led by Mamata.

With Abhishek emerging as the heir apparent of Mamata, the tussle between the ‘Old Guards’ versus ‘Young Turks’ within the TMC has been escalating, forcing the party supremo to relieve all leaders in the higher echelons of the organisation of their offices in February 2022.

The move was initially perceived as the one intended to clip the wings of Abhishek, but he was later reinstated as the national general secretary of the party.

The clamour within the TMC for the retirement of veterans continued to grow louder. Abhishek, himself, publicly stated that the politicians, like people in all other professions, should retire after reaching a certain age, leaving space for new leaders. Mamata, however, countered it, emphatically stating that the senior leaders must be respected.

Abhishek in 2023 undertook a 3500-km-long “Trinamool er Nabajowar Yatra” crisscrossing the state for 60 days, to blunt the anti-incumbency wave triggered by the allegations of corruption against him and other leaders of the party, which has been ruling the state since 2011.

He led the TMC’s campaign during the Lok Sabha elections in April-May 2024, ensuring the victory of the party’s candidates in 29 of the 42 parliamentary constituencies in West Bengal, leaving its principal challenger BJP far behind with just 12 Lok Sabha seats from the state – six less than the saffron party’s 2019 score of 18. The Congress won one seat, but the Communist Party of India (Marxist) drew a blank.

The TMC general secretary crisscrossed the state but refrained from campaigning in the constituencies of two veterans – Sudip Bandopadhyay and Kalyan Bandopadhyay, both well-known critics of the gen-next club within the TMC.

“I am still here. I am the final word,” Mamata told the TMC leaders on December 2 last year. Her comment was immediately interpreted as her way of dismissing speculations about the emergence of two power centres within the party. She, however, had a meeting with Abhishek early this month and purportedly gave him the go-ahead to make changes in the party organisation across West Bengal in order to make it battle-ready for the assembly elections next year.

Social scientist and political commentator, Surajit C Mukhopadhyay, said that the ‘Nabin’ versus ‘Prabin’ conflict or Mamata versus Abhishek tussle was largely stage-managed by the TMC for tactical management of the image of the party and its leaders as well as to keep resentment within the party under control. “They are just running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. That’s what a party fully dependent on the charisma of one or two persons always resorts to,” he told DH.