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Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress is grappling with an unprecedented internal rebellion and identity crisis, as the Election Commission’s interim decision to withhold the party’s name and symbol for upcoming West Bengal bypolls intensifies a struggle for its political future.
IMAGE: Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee shares a video message, in Kolkata, September 3, 2026. Photograph: Mamata Banerjee social media/ANI Video Grab
Key Points
- Mamata Banerjee, who founded TMC through rebellion, now faces an internal revolt threatening her party’s identity.
- The Election Commission’s interim decision to withhold TMC’s name and symbol for bypolls underscores a deeper struggle for the party’s political inheritance.
- This unprecedented situation forces both loyalists and rebels to contest without the established TMC identity.
- Past rebellions within TMC never displaced Mamata, but the current crisis exposes new vulnerabilities, especially after electoral setbacks.
- The struggle highlights tensions between the old guard and younger leadership, and criticisms of a centralised functioning style and dynastic politics.
Mamata Banerjee once made rebellion her political weapon, breaking away from the Congress to build the Trinamool Congress, but 28 years on, after weathering a string of revolts, she finds that weapon turned inward, striking at the very party identity she created and made synonymous with her political journey.
The Election Commission’s interim decision to keep the All India Trinamool Congress name and its “Flowers and Grass” symbol out of the October 6 West Bengal bypolls is therefore more than a dispute over electoral nomenclature.
It is the latest manifestation of a larger struggle over the political inheritance of a party Mamata has dominated since its birth.
The temporary order has produced an unprecedented situation — for the first time, both Mamata’s camp and the rebels must seek electoral recognition without the name and symbol under which the Trinamool Congress has contested elections for nearly three decades.
The Genesis Of TMC: A History Of Rebellion
For Mamata, rebellion is hardly an unfamiliar political language. It was the language and a political weapon through which her own career was forged.
In the mid-1990s, she fought a bitter organisational battle with then West Bengal Congress president Somen Mitra over control of the state unit.
Mitra retained the position. Mamata walked out.
On January 1, 1998, she founded the Trinamool Congress, turning her revolt against the Congress establishment into the defining political project of her career.
“Life has come full circle, as we know history always repeats itself. She broke away and tried to finish off the Congress despite being born out of the Congress. Karma has strange ways of getting back at you,” a senior Congress leader told PTI.
Mamata’s gamble had then succeeded. The TMC grew and emerged as the principal challenger to the Left Front and eventually became central to the political movement that ended the Communist Party of India-Marxist-led regime’s 34-year rule in Bengal.
The party’s emblem carried a personal imprint. Mamata sketched the twin flowers emerging from grass, an image that became the visual shorthand for its grassroots politics. That symbol survived a succession of rebellions.
Surviving Past Revolts And Internal Strife
Pankaj Banerjee, the party’s founding chairman, left soon after its formation and returned to the Congress before eventually coming back. Ajit Panja, another founding figure, clashed with Mamata over her political strategy in 2001 and unsuccessfully attempted to build a separate platform.
Sudip Bandopadhyay was expelled after falling out with Mamata and returned years later. Subrata Mukherjee, once regarded as one of her political mentors, led a breakaway before rejoining the TMC and later serving in her cabinet.
The pattern was repeated with Dinesh Trivedi and Mukul Roy.
Trivedi’s confrontation with Mamata over the 2012 railway fare increase ended his tenure as railway minister. Roy, once the party’s organisational number two, fell out with Mamata as Abhishek Banerjee’s influence grew, joined the BJP in 2017 and later returned to the TMC after the 2021 assembly election.
Some rebellions damaged the party electorally; others exposed tensions over strategy, ambition and succession. But none displaced Mamata as the political centre of the organisation.
That personalised equation surfaced again during the organisational turmoil of 2022, when tensions between the old guard and the younger leadership around Abhishek threatened to develop into a wider power struggle. Mamata dissolved the existing national office-bearer committee, reasserting herself as the final arbiter of the organisation.
Current Crisis: Vulnerability And Ideological Drift
Political analyst Shubhomoy Maitra believes the latest rupture has exposed a vulnerability that earlier rebellions did not.
“There was little surprise involved in the disintegration of the party once it suffered electoral defeat,” Maitra said, arguing that after the TMC achieved its central objective of removing the Left Front from power, it was left without “an ideological fulcrum” or “a long-term development vision for the state”.
The timing is significant. The TMC’s defeat in the 2026 assembly election saw its strength fall from 215 of the 294 seats in 2021 to 80, sharply weakening the organisational dominance that had helped contain competing ambitions.
Within weeks, 58 MLAs backed expelled leader Ritabrata Banerjee as their legislature party leader. He was subsequently recognised as leader of the opposition, while Mamata’s nominee Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay was rejected by the rebel group.
The revolt then travelled to Parliament. Twenty Lok Sabha MPs, led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, joined the little-known NCPI and announced their support for the BJP-led NDA. The TMC challenged the move before the Lok Sabha Speaker and sought their disqualification.
Rebel TMC MLA Sandipan Saha has sought to give the revolt an ideological dimension, arguing that the party has drifted from the principles on which it was founded and criticising an “increasingly centralised style” of functioning.
Saha questioned the shrinking space for internal discussion. His criticism of dynastic politics and Abhishek’s influence adds another layer to the succession battle.
The Road Ahead For Mamata And TMC
The Mamata camp sees the matter differently, describing the rebels as “a bunch of traitors” and stressing that the same legislators had contested the election only months earlier on a TMC ticket.
Senior TMC leader Saugata Roy, defending Mamata’s ability to survive the crisis, described such periods as “temporary in a political life” and advised her to “wait this out”. He predicted that the rebel MLAs would eventually return to the party fold.
Mamata’s political history was built on breaking away, building anew and then holding together what she had built. The irony of the present moment is that the rebellion she once used to create the TMC has now returned from within, reaching the very name and symbol that came to define her political journey.
For the founder who spent 28 years making the TMC synonymous with her leadership, the battle over the party’s identity has become the most direct challenge to the political legacy she created.
