- Mamata Banerjee’s TMC faced significant electoral defeat in 2026.
- Party split, name and symbol frozen by Election Commission.
- She now struggles to rebuild without original identity, resources.
Mamata Banerjee once walked out of the Congress with a bag, a few loyalists and a stubborn idea that Bengal needed a party of her own. That idea became the Trinamool Congress. For fifteen years it gave her the chief minister’s chair and a vote that looked unbreakable. In 2026 that machine cracked. The Bharatiya Janata Party won 207 seats. The Trinamool was reduced to 80. Suvendu Adhikari defeated her in Bhabanipur by 15,105 votes and took oath as Chief Minister. She lost the assembly, her own seat and the office she had treated as an extension of herself.
A majority of the newly elected Trinamool MLAs then refused to walk with her and gathered under Leader of the Opposition Ritabrata Banerjee. Twenty of twenty eight Lok Sabha members left for the Nationalist Citizens Party of India. Yesterday the Election Commission froze the All India Trinamool Congress name and the flowers and grass symbol she had carried since 1998.
Then Nandigram slipped. Sanchita Pradhan Dey met Suvendu Adhikari at Nabanna and withdrew. With no time to field another name, Banerjee said she would support the Congress nominee. In Rejinagar her candidate is still in the field. The woman who built a party from scratch is now fighting to keep a fragment of it, and to stay politically alive.
What The Election Commission Ruled
The Commission’s interim order did not crown a winner. It admitted a split. Two groups, one led by Mamata Banerjee and the other by Arup Roy with Ritabrata Banerjee as the legislative face, each claimed to be the real All India Trinamool Congress. The bench said the dispute needed a full hearing under Paragraph 15 of the Election Symbols Order, 1968, and that the October 6 by-elections in Nandigram and Rejinagar could not wait. Until a final decision, neither camp may use the parent name or the reserved flowers and grass mark.
The Commission allotted Mamata All India Trinamool Congress and the football player to her group, and Democratic Trinamool Congress and the envelope to the rebel camp. The original identity stays locked. When a recognised party breaks, the Commission first places both sides on even ground so that neither walks into a by-election wearing the old brand.
That even ground is the wound. For Banerjee the flowers and grass were the proof that she had left the Congress in 1998 and built something that belonged to her. Seeing that mark frozen tells every worker that the party she founded is now a legal file, not a family house.
Political Survival
Survival, not nostalgia, is the hard problem. Popularity still follows her. Two recent rallies showed that if a living crowd still answers to the Trinamool idea, it answers to her. Popularity is not power. Power needs MLAs, booth workers, a symbol people recognise on a ballot, and the ability to protect those who stay.She has very little of that. Around sixty of the eighty Trinamool MLAs sit with Ritabrata Banerjee and hold the formal opposition space in the assembly. On paper they are the opposition. On the ground the BJP government treats them more gently than her remaining loyalists. Workers who once leaned on the party for cover now ask who can still protect them. Her faction cannot give a convincing answer.In Delhi the numbers are thinner.
Twenty MPs, led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar and Sudip Bandyopadhyay, have formed the NCPI bloc and spoken of working with the National Democratic Alliance. She is left with a handful in the Lok Sabha and a few in the Rajya Sabha. In a state where the BJP governs with a large majority, an opposition leader without legislators and without the old symbol becomes a voice, not an institution. She is losing that institution as her own people peel away.
ALSO READ: OPINION | 100 Days Out Of Power, Not Out Of Fight: The Didi Paradox In Bengal And National Politics
Vote Bank Will Crumble
Nothing in politics stays locked. After 2011 Banerjee kept office on two large blocks, minorities and women. Muslims, about 27 per cent of the state’s population by the last census, gave her a wall of support for a decade and a half. That wall already cracked in 2026. In Murshidabad, Malda and parts of the north, the Muslim vote split among the Trinamool, the Congress, the Left and Humayun Kabir’s Aam Janata Unnayan Party. Hindu votes tightened behind the BJP. The split is now inside the party.
Many MLAs who walked to the Ritabrata camp come from minority belts. Those voters will not move to the BJP in a hurry. They also no longer see one obvious address. Why vote for a leader who cannot keep her legislators, her name or her Nandigram candidate. The minority vote is likely to scatter again among her faction, the Congress and the Left.
Women were the other pillar. Lakshmir Bhandar made the Trinamool look like a household party. The Adhikari government has replaced it with Annapurna Bhandar, three thousand rupees a month, already reaching around one and a half crore women. The BJP has time, the treasury and the credit of office. A welfare loyalty built on the state cheque does not survive a change of paymaster for long. If both pillars loosen, her residual vote will not stay a solid block.
Will Bengal Congress Like Alliance With Mamata
After the by-elections were notified she offered Nandigram to the Congress and tried to keep Rejinagar. The offer looked generous. It was poor politics. Nandigram is Suvendu Adhikari’s fortress. The Trinamool organisation there was already broken before 2026. She herself could not win that seat in 2021. Handing it over was less an alliance than an admission that her camp could not fight the seat.
Rejinagar, in Murshidabad, was once Congress country. The Trinamool later took the Muslim vote, but the district memory of the Congress never fully died. She wanted to keep her own candidate there. Then Sanchita Pradhan Dey withdrew and Banerjee had no choice but to back Milan Pradhan of the Congress.Rahul Gandhi has spoken to her. Sonia Gandhi has been softer towards her than many in the state unit. That warmth in Delhi does not settle the quarrel in Bengal.
For fifteen years Banerjee hollowed out the Pradesh Congress and took its workers and its minority base. Now the Bengal Congress sees a rare opening to stand again on its own feet. Carrying her record is not a natural choice for local leaders. She wants the Congress as a crutch. The question is whether the West Bengal Pradesh Congress will agree.
What Next For Didi
The path left is the oldest one she knows, and the hardest at her age. She has to start again. Rebuild a party without the old name, without most of her MLAs, without a nephew the ranks will applaud on command. The anger against Abhishek Banerjee is not a side plot. Legislators say they were told to stand and clap for him after a defeat. If survival demands it, she will have to choose between the party and the family claim on the party.She has to leave the style of the last years, walk the districts, and treat workers as partners rather than staff.
The recent rallies prove that sympathy still travels with her. Crowds cannot be taken for granted. The BJP’s hand in the break, and its softer line towards the rebel camp, has created public unease. That unease is not a restored opposition. She will not vanish tomorrow. Becoming again the opposition leader Bengal once knew needs organisation, protection for those who stay, and a politics reinvented from the roots. It is easier said than done. It is also the only way left.
ALSO READ: OPINION | Bengal’s Puja Politics: BJP Once Targeted TMC’s Patronage, Now It Faces The Same Test
(Sayantan Ghosh is the author of two books, Battleground Bengal and The Aam Aadmi Party, and teaches at St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata.)
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: abplive.com
