Bengal after Mamata: What Explains the Collapse of TMC's House of Cards?

TMC's defeat is more than an electoral failure, it's also a shift of 'franchisees' that Mamata depended on.

A political analysis of the TMC's defeat and the transition of power in the state reveals a complex look into the electoral structures in West Bengal.

(Source: X / Edited by The Quint)

The temptation, after the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC) defeat in West Bengal, is to begin with the numbers and conclude that the party is wounded but not finished. After all, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 207 seats and TMC was reduced to 80, but the vote-share gap was far less dramatic. Roughly 46 percent for BJP and 41 percent for TMC, with a vote-share difference of only 5 percent. On paper, this seems to suggest that TMC remains socially entrenched, even if electorally devastated.

But this is precisely where the numbers may deceive us.

TMC’s 41 percent vote share should not be read as a stable reservoir of loyalty. It may be better understood as a residual incumbency vote – the last accumulation of welfare memory, minority protection, local brokerage and Mamata Banerjee’s fading charisma under conditions in which many voters were still living politically inside the old regime.

The more important question is not how many voted for TMC in the election just concluded, but how many will still have reason to do so when panchayat, municipal, and Lok Sabha elections arrive under a new dispensation.

This distinction helps us understand why the organisational exodus from TMC has been so swift. The party’s vote share has declined; its organisational authority is collapsing faster. Elected representatives, councillors, local brokers and district-level operators are not merely responding to the election result. They are anticipating the next one.

To understand this, one must separate two levels of explanation. The first concerns voters. The second concerns those who mediate voters’ access to power.

Political Economy of Mamata's Rule

For 15 years, TMC was not simply a party. It was a political economy. It delivered welfare schemes, especially to women; it offered many Muslims not only representation but also protection against the BJP’s majoritarian advance; and it distributed patronage, mediation, access and small securities to peasants, Dalits, informal workers, local contractors, clubs, neighbourhood committees and urban poor households.

Some of this was programmatic welfare. Much of it was brokerage. TMC’s appeal lay in its ability to make the state reachable.

This is why political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya’s concept of “franchisee politics” is so useful. In his formulation, TMC under Mamata Banerjee worked through local entrepreneurs and strongmen who used “brand Mamata” to build their own territorial power. They were expected to maintain loyalty upwards while exercising considerable autonomy downwards.

In an interview, Bhattacharyya describes this as a system in which local actors used Mamata’s image to run businesses, accumulate influence and mediate access to government-linked resources. The Indian Express has similarly described this arrangement through the Bengali formulation “didi’s party, dada’s dol”, i.e., Mamata’s party, but the local strongman’s group.

This is what made TMC powerful, but also brittle. Unlike the CPI(M), which had once possessed a recognisable ideological infrastructure, cadre culture and organisational worldview, TMC’s coherence rested less on doctrine than on delivery, protection, and personality. Its politics of bhata, allowances, transfers and welfare benefits, created an extensive electoral connection, but not necessarily a deep ideological attachment.

Mamata Banerjee could defeat an unpopular Left because she represented something larger than TMC itself: courage, injury, street-fighting authenticity and the promise of release from a tired regime. But beyond her, much of the party had little independent meaning. It was a vehicle of access. It worked because it could deliver. Once delivery, protection, and charisma weakened together, the organisation’s internal hollowness became visible.

The TMC model worked because it joined welfare, coercion, affect and transaction.

The voter did not always encounter TMC as an ideology. She encountered it as the local councillor who could help with a form, the panchayat member who could intervene with the police, the party worker who could ensure a benefit, the ward-level leader who could protect a neighbourhood, or the broker who could settle a dispute.

For Muslims, this often carried an additional significance. TMC offered protection from a feared BJP future. For many women, welfare schemes helped sustain Mamata’s moral claim as Didi. For many others, the party remained useful because it controlled the channels through which power flowed.

The scandals that damaged TMC were, therefore, not ordinary scandals. RG Kar, Sandeshkhali, cash-for-jobs allegations, and the wider perception of criminalised local power did not merely hurt the party’s reputation. They weakened the moral contract that had made the franchisee model tolerable.

As long as the local broker delivered welfare, access and protection, corruption could be absorbed as the cost of doing politics. But when the protector began to look like the predator, the system lost its ethical alibi. Post-election assessments have linked the defeat to corruption, law and order, factionalism and the crisis of localised TMC power.

This is also where Mamata Banerjee’s symbolic trajectory matters. Her earlier charisma drew from a recognisable political mythology, the lone streetfighter against a giant, the woman of ordinary cultural idiom facing the entrenched Left, the wounded but unflinching heroine of Bengal’s anti-CPI(M) transition.

That heroic image allowed her to rise above the ordinariness of the party she built.

TMC could be corrupt, violent, factional and transactional, but Mamata herself could still appear as something more than the sum of those parts. Once that distinction collapsed, the party lost its final adhesive.

In a Girardian sense, the heroine risks becoming “the scapegoat”, the figure onto whom a wider society transfers its accumulated resentment against a collapsing order. The anger is not just against Mamata as an individual. It is against what the Mamata-centred system came to authorise, tolerate and shelter. This is where the second level of explanation begins. Why are local leaders leaving now?

What Explains the Exodus?

The answer is brutally simple. TMC without state power is not the same organisation. A franchisee party depends on the value of the franchise. In a party held together by ideology, defeat may produce discipline; in a party held together by access, defeat produces exit. Once the brand loses office, the local franchisee loses access to police leverage, welfare delivery, contracts, administrative pressure, municipal influence and panchayat resources.

This is why the 41 percent vote share may be politically misleading. It is not fake, but it may already be melting. Much of it was attached to TMC’s capacity to govern. Once that capacity disappears, the voters who remained with the party in the Assembly election may reconsider their choices in the next electoral round. Local leaders understand this before analysts do. They know that voters often follow not only ideology or memory, but the visible location of power.

Santanu Sen’s resignation as TMC national spokesperson is significant precisely because it names the moral crisis from within. He reportedly wrote that the people of Bengal had rejected the party over “immoral acts and corruption,” including RG Kar, the Abhaya case and cash-for-jobs corruption.

But Sen was not an isolated dissenter.

In the weeks after the defeat, TMC suspended spokespersons Kohinoor Majumdar, Riju Dutta, and Kartik Ghosh for six years over alleged anti-party remarks, while Arup Chakraborty also resigned from his post as party spokesperson. The spokesperson crisis matters because these were precisely the figures tasked with publicly defending the party’s moral and political line.

When those who were meant to explain the defeat begin resigning, being suspended, or distancing themselves from the official narrative, the crisis is no longer only electoral. It becomes discursive. The party begins to lose control over the language through which it explains itself.

The Falta repoll intensified this perception. BJP’s candidate won by over one lakh votes, while the TMC finished fourth and lost its deposit. One should not overgeneralise from a single contest, but symbolically it matters. It tells local actors that TMC’s residual vote can collapse rapidly when the election is fought outside the protective aura of incumbency.

This is also where Suvendu Adhikari becomes central.

Adhikari is not simply the BJP’s chief minister or a former TMC leader. He is the living proof that defection can be converted into supremacy. He was once embedded in TMC’s own rise, especially through Nandigram. He joined BJP, defeated Mamata Banerjee in Nandigram in the 2021 Assembly election, became the state BJP’s most recognisable face, and is now chief minister after BJP’s 2026 victory. For a wavering TMC leader, this career sends a clear message: one can leave TMC, enter BJP, retain local networks, and be rewarded.

This makes the BJP more attractive to TMC defectors and more accommodative towards them. Adhikari provides the grammar of conversion. He knows TMC’s internal architecture, which local leader matters, who commands booths, who controls a municipality, who can move a minority cluster, who has coercive capacity, and who merely performs loyalty.

For the BJP, older RSS-linked organisation offers ideology and discipline, while Suvendu offers intimate knowledge of the defeated regime’s machinery.

The long-term consequences are, therefore, complex. In the short run, the ex-TMC lobby inside BJP will almost certainly strengthen. A wave of converts will not enter as isolated individuals. They will bring followers, resentments, local rivalries, money networks and habits of rule. Many will naturally gravitate towards Adhikari because he represents the successful route from TMC insider to BJP ruler.

But therein lies BJP’s danger. The party won by denouncing TMC’s corruption, syndicate politics, minority appeasement and localised violence. If it absorbs too many of the same franchisees, it may reproduce the very order it claimed to overthrow. Bengal may then witness not the dismantling of franchisee politics, but its saffronisation.

The deepest transformation, therefore, is not simply that voters have moved from TMC to BJP. It is that Bengal’s local brokers are relocating themselves from the old address of power to the new one. TMC’s 41 percent vote share records the final election of one political regime, but it may not represent a durable political community. It may instead mark the last moment when welfare memory, minority fear, local patronage and Mamata’s residual charisma still held together. The defections are announcing something more severe. The collapse of a party that, once stripped of Mamata’s magic and state power, no longer knows what holds it together.

(Niladri Chatterjee is Senior Lecturer and Researcher, Department of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University, Sweden; Affiliated researcher, University of Oslo, Norway. Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor, South Asian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)