Rebellion, Frozen Symbol, Lost Power: Mamata Banerjee Faces Her Biggest Crisis

Nearly three decades after Mamata Banerjee broke away from the Congress to build the Trinamool Congress, she is confronting a crisis that reaches the party she created: rebellion within, a battle over its name and symbol, and the BJP’s emergence as Bengal’s ruling force. Mamata once challenged the Congress and Left, built a street-politics movement and became Bengal’s dominant force defeating Communist leader Somnath Chatterjee in Jadavpur in 1984. Her differences over the Left Front deepened. In 1993, she led a Writers’ Building march demanding voter ID cards; police firing killed 13 Congress workers. In 1998, she left Congress and founded the Trinamool Congress. Street agitations, Singur and Nandigram transformed her politics, ending 34 years of Left rule. But Nandigram became the setting for her first major reversal: in 2021, Mamata lost the seat to former aide Suvendu Adhikari by around 2,000 votes, though the Trinamool retained power. The 2026 election altered Bengal, with the BJP winning 207 of 294 seats, ending the Trinamool’s 15-year rule. Adhikari retained Bhabanipur and vacated Nandigram. After Mamata’s candidate withdrew following a meeting with him, she backed Congress candidate Milan Pradhan for the October 6 bypoll. That decision captures another reversal. Congress, once a rival and described by Mamata as the BJP’s “B-team”, is now a “sister party” and “natural alliance”. However, the West Bengal Congress remains opposed to an alliance with the Trinamool. State Congress leaders remain wary after years of political confrontation and large-scale defections from Congress to Trinamool. Therefore, Congress support on specific issues is not necessarily translating into a broader electoral understanding in Bengal. The deeper crisis is institutional: the EC has frozen the Trinamool name and ‘Jora Ghash Phul’ symbol pending rival claims, turning the dispute into a fight over political identity.