Shikha Mukerjee | The Rise and the Fall of Mamata and Her Party

Some things in electoral politics have become predictable ever since 2014. Where defections are constrained by the law of two-thirds, legislators are encouraged by the law to take a more complicated route and work assiduously to manoeuvre a breakup the party and form a new one. It has also become routine for the breakaway group of legislators to appropriate the name of the original party.

The audacious split of the Trinamul Congress by an unlikely duo in just 27 days after the May 4 defeat -- Ritabrata Banerjee and Sandipan Saha -- neither of whom were prominent or controversial or audibly disgruntled leader of Mamata Banerjee’s party or government, is an entirely new chapter in breakup politics in India.

There are no obvious and visible rewards for breaking up the Trinamul Congress. The 58 MLAs claiming to be the new Trinamul Congress will sit in Opposition. The elected BJP with a two-thirds majority has no particular use for any support these legislators could offer. A tractable Opposition does, however, serve a purpose: the BJP gets to claim that multi-party democracy is alive and kicking, without the stress of a strong Opposition, within the legislature and outside it.

No leader of the new Trinamul Congress is quite like Eknath Shinde, who was rewarded for breaking up the Shiv Sena and forming an alliance with the BJP; he was made chief minister in 2022 and then settled for being deputy chief minister in 2024 after the Maharashtra elections, willing to serve as deputy to the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis. Having taken over the larger group of Trinamul Congress legislators, after convincing the Speaker, Rathin Basu, to recognise him and his fellow rebels as the “real” TMC and dismissively assigning the role of “chief adviser” to Mamata Banerjee, Ritabrata Banerjee is an intriguing operator in Indian politics.

It raises the question: why or rather how did Ritabrata Banerjee, a relative newcomer to the TMC, and certainly not one of the party’s stars or prominent leaders, capture the loyalty of 57 other newly-elected legislators? And why did they agree to join him in vivisecting the party? The only reward for steering the split is that Ritabrata Banerjee gets to be Leader of the Opposition, which means he gets the same perks and privileges as a Cabinet minister.

As attention swivels to what the 28 Trinamul Congress Members of Parliament will do and who amongst them will take the lead in engineering the split that is widely expected, the question is about when it will happen rather than whether it will happen. A split in the Trinamul Congress in the Lok Sabha will mean a big deal, as the BJP plans to reintroduce the defeated delimitation of constituencies bill and bring in the “one nation-one election” change.

With negotiations reportedly underway as well to woo the DMK’s support of 22 MPs in the Lok Sabha and eight MPs in the Rajya Sabha for the delimitation bill, the addition of two-thirds of Trinamul Congress’ 28 MPs in the Lok Sabha and 13 MPs in the Rajya Sabha would help the BJP considerably over the numbers hump it faces. The cohesion within the INDIA bloc that thwarted the BJP’s proposal for clubbing delimitation with women’s reservation is now broken.

Where does that leave the rump of the legislature party and Mamata Banerjee? Saddled with a divided Trinamul Congress, where even at the grassroots breaks with the original party are being engineered as a survival strategy by the councillors of municipalities and mayors of municipal corporations, panchayat functionaries and even party leaders.

Faced by the flood of desertions within the party, she seems to be floundering. Attention has been diverted, both Mamata Banerjee’s and that of the public, from the unresolved status of nearly 27 lakh deleted voters whose cases are still under adjudication. Her promises to fight for their right to be recognised as citizens have been overtaken by the more basic fight to prevent the Trinamul Congress from being dismembered.

A street fighter by instinct, with a cult following mesmerised by her past confrontations, Mamata Banerjee’s expertise is not exactly the best suited to dealing with the enemy within the Trinamul Congress. She is known to succumb to sob stories and overlook ethical and normative infractions. If she cannot be as ruthless as the situation demands for reorganising the Trinamul Congress, the outlook for the party that remains with her is probably bleak.

Mamata Banerjee has to fight on two fronts; prevent the dismemberment of her party to the point where it becomes politically ephemeral, in the state Assembly certainly and also in Parliament. She has to figure out how to salvage the wreck that the breakaway groups have left behind. These breakups rob the party of its organisational backbone, immobilising the apparatus of control and command. The modus operandi of converging the party’s position with support from the administration and the police made the Trinamul Congress a classic example of a “state party”.

The party does have an organisation in the districts, where territory has been distributed to key leaders. Without access to the power and apparatus of the State, the Trinamul Congress and Mamata Banerjee are seriously hamstrung and considerably diminished, just as the CPI(M)-led Left Front was after its devastating defeat in 2011.

By reorganising the party, Mamata Banerjee has not addressed the problem of the elephant in the Trinamul Congress, Abhishek Banerjee, her anointed heir and the target of all attacks by rebel party people involved with the breakups, as the root of all that was evil within the organisation. That he is at the heart of the crisis is the result of a narrative that has grown with every retelling by rebel party leaders and throughout the scorching campaign by the BJP.

Heaping all the blame on Abhishek Banerjee is absurd; as the culture of intimidation and corruption and absence of democracy within the Trinamul Congress was not entirely of his making. Shifting blame and holding him responsible for the unendurable rapaciousness of the party’s local functionaries implies that wrongdoers were not responsible for their actions.

The future of the breakaway Trinamul Congress may be even bleaker as it survives as a tractable Opposition, which it has effectively promised to be. The BJP gains the most. It gets a compliant Opposition, the support it needs for its reformist agenda on delimitation, “one-nation one-vote” dreams, without being faulted for destroying multi-party democracy or gobbling up smaller regional parties by converting them into independent franchisees.