Political parties usually survive defeat, but they often struggle to survive the sudden loss of power. That is the predicament facing the Trinamool Congress (TMC) party in West Bengal, a state of more than 100 million people in eastern India. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
Barely a month after being voted out of office, the party is facing a rebellion by most of its legislators, a potential split among its MPs and growing doubts about the authority of its founder, Mamata Banerjee. Banerjee is no ordinary regional leader. In 2011 the firebrand politician achieved what many thought impossible, ending 34 uninterrupted years of Communist rule in West Bengal. Time magazine later named her among the world's 100 most influential people. She would go on to govern for 15 years, turning the TMC into India's most successful regional party.
Which is what makes the events of the past month so startling. Last month Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to power in West Bengal, ending the TMC's 15-year rule. Yet Banerjee's party was hardly annihilated. It still won 26 million votes, only about three million fewer than the BJP, and retained roughly 40% of the popular vote. It remains a substantial political force, with 80 legislators in the state assembly and 28 members of parliament.
By any conventional measure, it should be regrouping after defeat. Instead, it appears to be coming apart. The real shock came inside the legislature. Within weeks of the election, roughly three-quarters of the TMC's legislators revolted against both Banerjee and her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, widely seen as her heir. The rebels seized control of the party's legislative wing, installed their own opposition leader and accused the leadership of forging signatures on legislative documents.
What initially appeared to be a state-level mutiny has now spread to Delhi. A reported 20 of the TMC's 28 MPs have now written to the speaker of parliament seeking to break away from the party's parliamentary group and align themselves with the BJP-led ruling alliance. If confirmed, it would elevate the crisis from a legislative revolt to an existential challenge to the party's leadership and unity.
The parliamentary revolt is only the most visible symptom of a wider breakdown. In Falta, a constituency the TMC had won with 56% of the vote in 2021, the party failed even to keep a candidate in the fray for a repoll. Then came perhaps the starkest symbol of its decline: a public meeting earlier in June that drew only a few hundred people, a far cry from the vast crowds that once testified to Banerjee's political dominance.
Power has ebbed away with startling speed. Almost every day, TMC leaders are arrested on corruption charges and paraded, party offices are deserted, organisational networks are being dismantled and figures who once commanded fear and influence are being publicly attacked in their own strongholds.
"What has happened is quite unprecedented," says Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, a political scientist. The speed of the TMC's unravelling points to a deeper weakness. Unlike the communist movement it overthrew in 2011, the party never built a robust ideological structure capable of surviving the loss of power. Its unifying force was a combination of Banerjee's charismatic personal appeal and the patronage that comes with power. As Bhattacharyya puts it, the party rested on two pillars: "Mamata's brand value and governmental resources."
"To maintain control across Bengal, Banerjee relied less on party institutions than on powerful local leaders who were given considerable autonomy in their own fiefdoms," says Bhattacharyya. The arrangement worked while the party remained in power. Now both pillars that held the system together - state power and Banerjee's aura of invincibility - have weakened.
Rahul Verma, a fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, argues that the rise of a nationally dominant BJP has transformed the incentives facing regional politicians. "Earlier, defections tended to involve individual leaders breaking away. Today entire factions can rebel because the BJP provides an alternative centre of power, resources and political protection. The pattern resembles recent splits in parties such as Shiv Sena [a powerful regional party in western India] where a succession struggle and the concentration of power within one family triggered a large-scale rebellion," says Verma.
This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.