Politics occasionally writes poetry. More often, it writes farce. Mamata Banerjee’s political career has managed to produce both.
In 1998, she stormed out of Congress, accusing the Grand Old Party of ignoring grassroots workers and becoming the private estate of a select few.
She named her new outfit the Trinamool Congress – literally, the Congress of the grassroots. It was a clever name and an even cleverer political pitch.
The message was simple: Delhi’s drawing-room politicians had forgotten the worker sweating in the village, the booth agent cycling through the rain, and the party loyalist whose only reward was another slogan to shout.
For thirteen years, she fought, agitated, marched, fasted, and battled. Then came 2011. The woman from Kalighat did what many thought impossible.
She toppled the Left Front’s 34-year rule and marched into the Writers’ Building as Bengal’s new chief minister. The grassroots had conquered the establishment. Or so it seemed.
Corruption, infiltration, and political violence
Power has a peculiar habit. It slowly converts revolutionaries into the very establishment they once despised.
The party that was born to empower grassroots workers gradually became a party where decisions travelled in only one direction – from the top downward.
Ironically, the leader who complained that Congress ignored ordinary workers eventually presided over a system where many Trinamool workers felt exactly the same grievance.
Meanwhile, the slogan of ‘Maa, Maati, Manush’ increasingly found itself competing with allegations of corruption, syndicate culture, infiltration, political violence, and dynastic politics.
The grassroots movement slowly acquired a penthouse suite. Enter the crown prince Every political dynasty begins with the promise that it is not a dynasty.
Abhishek Banerjee’s rise was explained as organisational necessity, youthful energy, strategic thinking and modernisation. Critics called it something much simpler – family promotion.
Over time, many party veterans began to feel that Trinamool was no longer being run from the grassroots but from spreadsheets, consultants’ presentations, and election-management war rooms.
The grassroots had become PowerPoint. When victory arrives, nobody complains. When defeat arrives, everybody remembers.
Fifteen years in power, 30 days in free fall
The BJP’s victory changed everything. Parties can survive defeat. What they struggle to survive is the sudden discovery that everybody secretly dislikes everybody else.
Within weeks, the TMC found itself facing a mutiny that looked remarkably familiar. A large rebel faction emerged. MLAs began choosing sides. The term ‘Asli TMC’ entered the political vocabulary.
The rebels claimed they were saving the original spirit of the party. One could almost hear Congress leaders from 1998 laughing in the distance.
The rebel who borrowed Mamata’s script
Enter Ritabrata Banerjee. Every political drama requires a plot twist, and Bengal politics delivered one with enthusiasm.
The rebel leader’s message was almost poetic: the party had lost touch with its roots, become centralised, and needed rescuing from its current management.
The speech sounded suspiciously like something Mamata herself might have delivered against Congress three decades earlier. The circle was complete.
Mamata rebelled against Congress. Ritabrata rebelled against Mamata. The student had become the establishment. The establishment had acquired its own student.
The three Bs of Bengal
For years Bengal politics revolved around two Banerjees. Now it revolves around three.
Mamata represents the founder, her nephew Abhishek represents the heir, and Ritabrata represents the rebel. Together they form Bengal’s newest political trinity.
One built the house, another inherited the keys, while the third is trying to change the nameplate.
From grassroots to dust
The greatest irony is hidden in the party’s name. Trinamool means grassroots. After years of ruling from the top, the party may finally be returning to its roots. Not through organisational reform, not through ideological revival or through introspection.
But through a split. Perhaps that is history’s final joke on Mamata Banerjee. She left Congress because grassroots workers felt ignored.
She built Trinamool to empower them. She defeated the Left and ruled Bengal for fifteen years. And now, as rebels claim to be the ‘real’ Trinamool, she finds herself facing the very accusation she once levelled against Congress.
The wheel has turned. The grassroots have come back. Unfortunately for Mamata, they seem to be standing on the other side.
For a leader who founded a party called Trinamool, there could scarcely be a crueler ending. The movement that began from the grassroots may yet finish by biting the dust.
