Not the end for Mamata Banerjee, but the road back looks steep

The day Suvendu Adhikari took oath as chief minister of West Bengal’s first Bharatiya Janata Party government, his predecessor Mamata Banerjee celebrated Rabindra Jayanti – the birth anniversary of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore – in the courtyard of her residence, with just a handful of loyal Trinamool Congress workers.

The party she founded in 1998 and led to power in 2011 was already in a meltdown by then. BJP cadres – a mix of old-timers and recent turncoats – had unleashed the fury of the victor on the vanquished TMC supporters, in keeping with a tradition Mamata Banerjee’s party itself set after ousting the Left Front from power 15 years ago.

The knives had been out within the TMC, too, with many leaders, from known disgruntled and sidelined heavyweights to closet malcontents and ‘save-your-own-skin’ deserters, blaming Mamata’s nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, hitherto hailed as the senapati (army chief) of the party, and the political consultancy firm I-PAC for the debacle in the just-concluded Assembly elections.

Mamata, presiding over the Rabindra Jayanti celebration, not only hit out at the BJP over attacks on TMC workers but also called for a joint forum of the opposition parties and youth and civil society groups to take on the saffron party. Earlier, after the BJP routed the TMC in the polls, she had said she would work to strengthen the I.N.D.I.A. bloc against the BJP at the Centre.

The TMC supremo’s words appeared at odds with her own role within the I.N.D.I.A. in the past. Though she played a key role in bringing the opposition parties together in 2023 to take on the BJP, she refused to spare more than two of West Bengal’s 42 Lok Sabha seats for the Congress ahead of the 2024 parliamentary polls and even publicly questioned the party’s national strength.

The TMC went solo in the state after seat-sharing talks failed, while the Congress reached an understanding with the CPI(M)-led Left Front. After winning 29 seats, the TMC took a dig at the Congress and claimed only Mamata could pose a formidable challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Earlier, the party had poached 12 Congress MLAs in Meghalaya, while Abhishek asserted that the TMC would not play second fiddle to the Congress in Parliament. Mamata was also often seen trying to build a non-Congress subgroup within the I.N.D.I.A.

Mamata and Abhishek received calls from Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi after the TMC’s defeat. Rahul even publicly backed the TMC’s allegation that the BJP had rigged the polls with the Election Commission’s help. But the Congress leadership stayed silent on her plan to play a bigger role within the I.N.D.I.A., while its West Bengal leaders scoffed at her call for a joint anti-BJP platform. The CPI(M) – worst hit by the TMC’s rise – reacted similarly.

The TMC supremo on May 14 donned lawyers’ robes and went to the Calcutta High Court to seek protection for her party’s supporters from the attacks by the BJP cadres. It was her second public appearance since the rout.

Though some lawyers booed her, Mamata’s appearance before the court revived hope among loyalists that she would next return to what defined her political rise – fighting on the streets.

The BJP secured 2.92 crore votes (45.84%), while the TMC managed 2.60 crore (40.80%). The gap of around 32 lakh votes translated into a landslide for the BJP, which won 207 seats — 127 more than the TMC’s tally of 80. Though the scale of the defeat has pushed the TMC into its gravest crisis since coming to power, a political revival may still not be impossible for the party.

What is worrying for Mamata, however, is the speed with which the TMC – a party born out of mass agitation and led by a mass leader like her – unravelled after the electoral setback. The crisis laid bare how the TMC edifice, which had appeared formidable across West Bengal, had over the past 15 years come to rest heavily on the levers of power.

The rout exposed not just organisational weakness, but also a deeper crisis of credibility within the ruling party. Mamata’s rise was built on projecting herself as the antithesis of an entrenched establishment. From her years of street protests against the Left Front to the Singur and Nandigram agitations that propelled her to power, she cultivated the image of an accessible, austere leader fighting for the dispossessed. But her last 15 years in power saw many accusations she once levelled against the Left Front – corruption, cadre excesses and strongman politics – being directed at her own party. Abhishek’s corporate-style political management increasingly seemed contradictory to Mamata’s image of a
closer-to-grassroots streetfighter.

The BJP’s ascent in West Bengal signals not merely a change of regime, but also the success of Hindutva vis-à-vis Mamata’s Bangaliyana. It presents the TMC with a delicate political challenge: retaining its secular credentials and support among the Muslims, significantly dented by the Congress and the CPI(M), while attempting to win back the Hindu Bengalis, whom the BJP succeeded in persuading to let Bengal’s long-celebrated sub-nationalist ethos yield to a broader Hindu political consciousness.

Not only will Mamata have to regain her credibility in national politics, but the TMC will have to return among the masses to revive itself in West Bengal.

Protests against demolition of roadside shops and fuel price hikes by the BJP governments in the state and the Centre, respectively, offer her an opportunity to take her party back to the streets and reconnect with the economically distressed.