Ritabrata Banerjee’s Hostile Capture of Trinamool Congress Strengthens BJP

Kolkata: Ritabrata Banerjee, a newly elected MLA, has laid claim to the legislative identity of the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC).

On June 3, a letter was presented to West Bengal Assembly Speaker Rathindra Bose, proposing Banerjee as the Leader of Opposition, defying an earlier official communication by the party. The letter bears the signatures of 59 TMC MLAs, more than the two-thirds needed for legislative identity.

Should this takeover succeed, it will go down as one of the most significant power grabs in Bengal’s political history.

Chronology of the rebellion

The first visible crack came almost immediately after the election. Ritabrata Banerjee’s relationship with the TMC high command began to deteriorate when he publicly questioned Jehangir Khan’s sudden withdrawal from the Falta re-poll. 

A day after the re-poll, a video surfaced showing him, exchanging warm pleasantries with Suvendu Adhikari, the newly installed BJP chief minister, at Banga Bhaban in New Delhi. Banerjee defended the exchange as routine political courtesy. He claimed he did not believe in the politics of ignoring or insulting opponents in public. When he again met Adhikari it could not really be called a convenient coincidence.

That moment created the atmosphere of suspicion in which the later rebellion exploded. 

The immediate trigger was the Leader of the Opposition controversy. After the election, Mamata Banerjee convened a meeting of the 80 newly elected TMC MLAs at her Kalighat residence. There, the name of veteran leader Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay was proposed for the post of Leader of the Opposition. But what should have been a routine legislative decision soon turned into an administrative, legal and political scandal.

The Assembly Speaker reportedly demanded proper minutes of the meeting and verifiable signatures of the MLAs supporting Chattopadhyay. This was where the crisis deepened. After the MLAs were sworn in and their signatures entered in the Assembly records, the TMC leadership attempted to gather formal signatures for the LoP resolution. But attendance had already begun to fall. 

A letter was submitted to the Speaker’s office carrying around 70 purported signatures in support of Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay. But when the Assembly Secretariat compared those signatures with the official records, serious discrepancies were reportedly detected. Some signatures allegedly did not match the oath-time signatures. Some were written in block letters. What began as a procedural step now looked like something far more damaging.

Ritabrata Banerjee and Sandipan Saha, two newly elected MLAs, complained to the Speaker that they had never consented to Chattopadhyay’s appointment and that their signatures had allegedly been forged. The controversy soon turned into a police matter, with a complaint reportedly filed against Mamata Banerjee's nephew and TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee over cheating, forgery and conspiracy. For a party already reeling from defeat, this could have devastating consequences.

Transfer of confidence

For years, the TMC operated on a strictly hierarchical, highly centralised model, anchored by the charismatic appeal of Mamata Banerjee and the increasingly bureaucratic control exercised by her nephew who is also the National General Secretary of the party. The crushing defeat in the West Bengal assembly elections shattered the absolute authority of the party high command. 

The initially elected bloc of 80 TMC MLAs suddenly found itself in an opposition role for which the party was fundamentally unprepared. Accused of monumental corruptions, stripped of state resources, deprived of the administrative machinery it had long relied upon, and facing the immediate threat of hostile investigations by central and state agencies, the party entered a vacuum of direction, discipline and protection.

The party that Mamata Banerjee built from the ground up, through decades of street-level struggle and political confrontation, now finds itself on the verge of a hostile takeover by a first-time MLA.

That the rebellion has successfully penetrated the TMC’s established old guard reveals a bitter reality for Mamata Banerjee. The reported alignment of veteran figures such as Chandranath Sinha, Rathin Ghosh, Javed Khan, Kajal Sheikh, Shiuli Saha, Arup Roy, Samir Panja, Golam Rabbani, and Akharuzzaman, demonstrates that the mutiny extends deep into Mamata Banerjee’s broader social and district-level architecture.

Faced with this existential threat, the TMC has resorted to drastic organisational measures. On Wednesday, the party has summarily dissolved key state committees and frontal organisations across West Bengal in a desperate bid to contain the internal revolt.

After careful consideration, it has been decided that all committees of the All India Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, as well as all its frontal organisations, shall stand dissolved with immediate effect.

The party will undertake a comprehensive exercise of introspection,…

— All India Trinamool Congress (@AITCofficial) June 3, 2026

Yet, it lays bare the reflexive act of a leadership trying to clear the board simply because it no longer knows which of its own pieces have turned against it.

BJP’s strategic interest: A political buffer

If Trinamool collapses completely, Bengal politics may naturally move towards a direct confrontation between the BJP and a revived Left-Congress alliance. TMC’s defeat has already shaken its claim to being the sole protector of anti-BJP politics in the state. In such a situation, anti-BJP voters, especially minorities, secular voters, Left sympathisers, and those disillusioned with both TMC corruption and BJP communalism, could begin moving towards the Left-Congress formation.

With 55% of the population still against the ruling party, and 30% of the electorates Muslim, the BJP would want to prevent a binary contest. A breakaway TMC faction can serve as a political buffer. It can occupy the opposition space without becoming a real ideological threat to the BJP. It can divide the anti-BJP vote, confuse minority voters, and prevent a clean bipolar contest between the BJP and the Left-Congress alliance.

This is why the reported movement of minority legislators becomes politically significant. With a substantial section of TMC’s Muslim MLAs moving towards the rebel faction, it is a strategic intervention in Bengal’s opposition politics. It also helps to create a controlled opposition bloc. Trinamool in name, but emptied of its original anti-BJP function.

Whether this is formally engineered or merely politically convenient, the result is the same. BJP gains breathing space, the Left-Congress alliance is blocked from becoming the automatic alternative, and Bengal’s opposition vote remains fragmented.

Expansion politics

Since coming to power in 2011, TMC has expanded by absorbing leaders from rival parties. Congress MLAs, Left leaders, local strongmen, district-level organisers, trade union faces and ideological opportunists were all welcomed into the TMC fold. The immediate objective was seemingly to weaken the opposition, consolidate power, and turn Bengal into an opposition-free state.

Ritabrata Banerjee is a symbol of that contradiction. He entered public life as a Left student leader and opposed the very political movement that brought Mamata Banerjee to power. He cultivated strong relationships with the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s top leadership and steadily rose through the ranks. The party sent him to the Rajya Sabha, where he hobnobbed with rival party leaders and often made the news for this. Later, when the Left weakened and he was expelled over serious misconduct, he courted the BJP leadership before moving closer to the TMC.

Banerjee's politics has responded to power. When the Left still commanded intellectual and organisational weight, he was a Marxist firebrand. When the CPI(M) declined and Trinamool became the natural centre of Bengal’s political life, he found a place in Mamata Banerjee’s camp and claimed to have seen sparks of Lenin within her. In TMC, he was known to be close to Abhishek Banerjee, which helped him return to the Rajya Sabha again, and secure a relatively safer seat in the assembly election. 

Now, with TMC defeated and BJP in power, he appears once again to have discovered the direction in which power flows. His rebellion has the unmistakable effect of weakening TMC further while preventing the opposition space from naturally moving towards a Left-Congress revival.

Furtherance of the Shinde Model

The comparison with Eknath Shinde and the Shiv Sena is obvious, but Bengal’s situation is in many ways even more remarkable.

In Maharashtra, Shinde’s rebellion against Uddhav Thackeray was also a major act of political rupture. But Shinde could at least claim a long organic relationship with the Shiv Sena. He had spent decades inside the organisation. He had worked within its structure, represented its cadre culture and risen through its internal hierarchy. One may criticise his rebellion, but one cannot say he was an outsider to the Sena tradition.

Ritabrata Banerjee cannot make a similar claim. It is one thing for a son to fight over a house built by his father. It is another for a former adversary to walk in after the storm, seize the keys, and declare himself the rightful heir.

The defection culture that turned against its creator

There is, however, a deep irony in Mamata Banerjee’s current predicament.

For years, she presided over precisely the kind of politics that has now returned to haunt her. Under TMC rule, Bengal saw repeated defections from Congress, left and BJP. Opposition MLAs crossed over. Local bodies were captured. The phrase “birodhi mukto”, opposition-free, became not just a slogan of dominance but a political method.

Mamata Banerjee did not invent political defection in India. But in Bengal, she normalised a culture in which elected mandates could be bent, opposition parties could be hollowed out, and institutional morality could be sacrificed at the altar of power.

Today, the same method has been turned against her.

There is a human tragedy here. Mamata Banerjee is 71, and it is impossible to deny that she built TMC through extraordinary personal struggle. To see her life’s political creation challenged from within, and that too by someone who entered the party after opposing its rise, is a cruel spectacle.

Did she deserve this personally? Perhaps not. Did her politics create the conditions for this? Undeniably, yes.

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