The Mamata Banerjee-helmed Trinamool Congress is going through internal turmoil in Bengal for the past several days. This Sunday, the TMC supremo and Bengal chief minister called an emergency meeting with the senior leadership and reconstituted the national working committee of the party.
During this meeting, Banerjee dissolved all the posts of the organisation, including that of the national general secretary of the TMC, Abhishek Banerjee, as well.
The seed of this growing discontent within several sections of the party is the alleged high-handedness of Mamata’s nephew Abhishek. Significantly, in this newly formed 20-member national working committee, Banerjee has not included the majority of the senior leaders from other states - for instance, Sushmita Dev, who is a Rajya Sabha MP of the TMC, having joined the party from the Congress and former Goa CM Luizinho Faleiro, who also switched over from the Congress and joined the TMC some months ago and is also an RS member, are not part of the party’s newly formed national working committee.
The key reason behind not including these people is their closeness to Abhishek. After the historic victory of TMC in the 2021 assembly elections, Mamata Banerjee appointed Abhishek as the party’s all-India general secretary.
His fundamental role was to expand the TMC’s footprint in other states and he decided to work on the expansion of the party with the help of poll strategist Prashant Kishor and his organisation, the I-PAC. With the sidelining of Abhishek right now, the buzz within the TMC is that the party will cut off all ties with Prashant Kishor’s I-PAC. With both these developments, it becomes clear that right now, the key challenge in front of Mamata will be reworking the expansion plans of the party. Amid this internal conflict recently, Banerjee decided not to visit Goa for last-minute campaigning.
Goa was one of the first ventures of Abhishek in expanding the TMC presence and Prashant Kishor played a pivotal role in this process. The party has already formed an alliance with the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party of Goa but in reality, the chances of electoral gain for the TMC alone are slim. On the ground, word is that if the TMC does not gain much electorally, then post-poll, the MGP may come out of the alliance and support the possible ruling formation.
Meanwhile, in Tripura, Sudip Roy Burman has again joined the Congress. In this situation, the outcome from this state in the coming years will probably not be satisfactory for the TMC as well.
In the new national working committee of the TMC, there are only two leaders from other states of India. The first is former BJP leader and Union Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha and the other is former Congress leader Rajesh Tripathi from Uttar Pradesh. According to TMC insiders, both these leaders joined the party after direct consultations with Banerjee herself. It is believed that Abhishek and Kishor played a key role in bringing in most of the other leaders into the party fold. Political observers believe that there is also a good side to the rift between the TMC and Prashant Kishor.
It is believed that Kishor played a key role in stopping the party from going along with the Congress. Mamata Banerjee and Congress president Sonia Gandhi share close ties. However, after the West Bengal election of 2021, the relationship between the Congress party and TMC worsened. In the last several months, Mamata has attacked the Congress party several times.
But recently, Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chaudhury, who is her staunch critic, has softened his attacks on her. Recently, he said that in Bengal the corruption during the municipality elections happened through the IPAC and Banerjee may not have any clue about these developments.
Significantly, amid this internal turmoil, Mamata has reached out to regional political heavyweights like Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao. Mamata is expected to meet with other opposition chief ministers in Delhi soon, to discuss constitutional overstepping and present misuse of power by the governors.
This could be seen as the initial step to work on the expansion plan of the party. Here too, the message is loud and clear: Mamata is taking back control of the party’s expansion plan. However, just taking back control alone will not help the party.
In Bengal and beyond, the only image that matters for the party is that of Mamata Banerjee. It is high time the party focussed on a new expansion plan, one which should not focus on weakening the Congress party but bring everyone together.
For Banerjee, the rift with Kishore is the golden moment to reconstitute the party. In the last few months, in the eyes of people, the TMC has become a political party that wants to divide the opposition vote by harming the Congress and other regional parties. For a charismatic leader like Mamata, such tags are not suitable.
She still has the time to re-establish her ties with the Congress and play an important role in shaping opposition unity.
(The writer is an independent journalist based in Kolkata and former policy research fellow, Delhi Assembly Research Centre. He tweets as @sayantan_gh. Views expressed are personal)
