Opinion | The Most Accurate Prediction About Trinamool? An MS Aiyar 'Joke', From 1997

Towards the end of 1997, Mani Shankar Aiyar briefly tried the Trinamool experiment. He did not stay long. Later, with his typical dry wit, he told me something that still explains the party better than many academic papers: "I did not realise that Trinamool was the fourth football club of Bengal - after Mohun Bagan, Mohammedan Sporting, and East Bengal."

It was a brilliant line because it was not merely funny. It was diagnostic.

The Trinamool Congress (TMC) was never a conventional party in the Congress, CPI(M), BJP, or DMK sense. It was an emotion before it was an organisation. A camp before it was a constitution. Its cadres did not merely support Mamata Banerjee; they inhabited an atmosphere around her - wounded pride, defiance, anti-Left resentment, street courage, cultural belonging, and an almost football-like loyalty where argument mattered less than colour.

For many years, this worked spectacularly. Mamata converted restlessness into revolt, revolt into mandate, and mandate into domination. A party founded in 1998 became the vehicle that ended 34 years of Left rule in 2011 and then retained Bengal for three consecutive terms. In its golden phase, Trinamool looked less like a party and more like Bengal's operating system.

That is why its present implosion is not just another post-defeat crisis. Political parties lose elections, such is the nature of the beast. The Congress lost power in 1977 and lived to return. The BJP lost in 2004 and lived to reinvent itself. The Left lost Bengal after three decades and still retains cadre memory, ideological habit, and organisational residue. What is happening to the TMC is different. It is not defeat alone. It is the sudden discovery that a party built on personalised power, local intimidation, welfare loyalty, and access to the state may struggle to breathe once the state is taken away.

The Speed Of Collapse

The 2026 verdict was brutal. The BJP secured a sweeping majority in West Bengal, while the TMC was reduced to around 80 seats in the Assembly after 15 years in power. Mamata Banerjee herself lost Bhabanipur to Suvendu Adhikari, a defeat heavy with symbolism because Bhabanipur had long been more than a constituency; it was part of the Mamata myth.

Yet electoral defeat, by itself, need not have destroyed the party. In fact, for a leader of Mamata's stature, defeat could have been turned into a moral platform. She could have said: Bengal has spoken; we accept the verdict; we will fight as a disciplined opposition; our workers must protect the people, not themselves. It would have restored gravitas.

Instead, the party appeared uncertain, reactive, and internally frightened. Reports of 58 of its 80 MLAs backing Ritabrata Banerjee and a new rebel bloc have created a crisis that goes beyond dissent. It raises the question of who now owns the Trinamool name in practice, if not yet in law. The party's decision to expel Ritabrata Banerjee and Sandipan Saha was meant to establish authority. It seems to have exposed its limits.

Then came the scenes that would have been unimaginable a few months earlier: meetings called by Mamata Banerjee drawing embarrassingly thin attendance, reports that only eight of 80 MLAs and six of around 41 parliamentarians attended one crucial huddle, and the party disbanding committees and frontal organisations in the name of reorganisation. These are not small organisational adjustments. They are signs of a machine suddenly unsure whether its switches still work.

The latest unravelling this week has been even more telling: rebel MPs have claimed the support of 20 of the party's 28 Lok Sabha members, even though Mamata Banerjee's camp insists the real number is closer to 12. At least 14 of them reportedly attended a meeting at Union Minister Bhupender Yadav's residence, along with Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari - a tableau that would have been unthinkable even after May 4.

The Parliament Problem

The plight of Trinamool's MPs is perhaps the sharpest indicator of the party's new vulnerability. For years, the TMC's Parliamentary presence gave Mamata national weight. In the Lok Sabha, the party was a major non-BJP, non-Congress force. In the Rajya Sabha, it used its Bengal numbers to send articulate voices, professionals, loyalists, cultural figures, and political managers to Delhi.

But Parliamentary strength without state power is unstable. Lok Sabha MPs are already looking at 2029. They know that the organisational muscle, police-administration interface, booth networks, and local patronage that once protected them are no longer under the TMC's control. If the BJP government consolidates, and if the rebel faction claims to be the "real Trinamool", many MPs will ask an unsentimental question: where does survival lie?

The anti-defection law adds arithmetic to anxiety. If the party has 28 Lok Sabha MPs, 19 becomes the magic number. The Rajya Sabha MPs face a different problem. Their terms, influence, and future nominations depend upon legislative strength in Bengal. Once the party loses the Assembly, the renewal pipeline narrows sharply. A Rajya Sabha MP without a state machine behind him or her can become a dignified orphan: visible in Delhi, but politically homeless in Kolkata.

Power Politics Without Adversity Training

The central tragedy of the TMC is that it had become very good at power, but not good enough at adversity.

Mamata herself knows adversity. Her entire career was built from it. She fought the Left when the Left still looked invincible. She was assaulted, mocked, dismissed, isolated, and repeatedly underestimated. Her rise was one of the great stories of post-Congress Indian politics: a woman from a modest background defeating Bengal's most formidable political establishment.

But the party that grew around her did not always inherit that courage. Many inherited only the habits of power. Local dominance. Access. Pressure. Switching. Patronage. Control of clubs, municipalities, unions, police stations, welfare lists, contracts, and neighbourhood syndicate networks. This created an army of managers, not necessarily believers.

That is the difference between Mamata and much of her party. She knew how to be in opposition. Many Trinamool leaders know only how to be near the government. 

This model of politics - domination in power followed by fear in defeat - is unusually stark. It is not that the TMC politicians are the only opportunists in India. Far from it. But the scale of the contrast is striking. Yesterday's district strongman becomes today's neutral observer. Yesterday's loyalist becomes today's constitutional dissenter. Yesterday's beneficiary of centralised authority becomes today's critic of family control.

The rebel anger against Abhishek Banerjee also needs to be understood in this context. Succession in regional parties is rarely about ideology. It is about entitlement, access, and resentment. Many TMC leaders accepted Abhishek's rise while power seemed assured. Once defeat arrived, the same rise became a grievance. That does not mean every criticism of him is false. It means defeat has made private irritation public.

Mamata's Choices, Congress's Caution

Mamata Banerjee now has four options, none easy.

First, she can fight a legal and procedural battle to retain the official party structure, challenge the rebel bloc, and hold MPs - as many as she can - together. This may buy time, but it cannot rebuild legitimacy by itself.

Second, she can seek reconciliation with rebels, even if it means reducing Abhishek's authority and accepting a broader collective leadership. This would be painful, but politics often rewards survival over pride.

Third, she can rebuild from below - municipalities, panchayats, women's networks, minority voters, welfare beneficiaries, cultural workers, and those who still see her as the only authentic anti-BJP face in Bengal. This is the hardest road, but perhaps the only one that can restore her moral claim.

Fourth, she can seek a larger anti-BJP arrangement with the Congress and the Left, a mahajot of necessity. But herein lies the difficulty.

Why is the Congress not rushing into such a formation? Because it has little reason to rescue Mamata without terms. Bengal Congress workers have suffered politically under the TMC for years. The Left's hostility is even deeper. At the national level, the Congress may need every anti-BJP force inside the INDIA tent. But in Bengal, an immediate mahajot could make the Congress look like an ambulance for a wounded TMC.

The Congress will also wait to see who remains standing. Is Mamata still the principal opposition pole? Is Ritabrata Banerjee's bloc merely a transitional rebellion or the nucleus of a new Trinamool? Will the BJP successfully absorb the anti-TMC space? Will minorities remain with Mamata or distribute themselves more tactically? No serious party enters a grand alliance before knowing the answer to these questions.

There is another reason. A mahajot requires equality. Mamata has never been comfortable as one among many in Bengal. She has been the axis. The question is whether defeat has changed that self-perception. It may have, because, last heard, Mamata was contemplating a merger with the Congress to save her party from disintegrating. But that's not easy, as the parent organisation will seek transfer of all assets (offices, trusts, etc) that the Trinamool has accumulated over the years. Also, working under Rahul Gandhi, even as, say, Vice-President of the Congress, can be a nightmare. It is worth remembering that Sharad Pawar, too, had once had advanced-level merger talks with the Grand Old Party, but backed out when Rahul called for a transfer of all assets that the NCP had built.

For the TMC, therefore, the present crisis is both organisational and philosophical. Mani Shankar Aiyar's football club metaphor has returned with cruel force. Football clubs can survive relegation if they have supporters, structure, youth systems, and faith. But if a club has only star worship and match-day noise, defeat empties the stands very quickly.

Trinamool's future depends on whether it is still a political party, or merely a decaying stadium after the floodlights have gone off.

(Rasheed Kidwai is an author, columnist and conversation curator)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author