Like the second most senior official in one of the country's ruling parties has been ordered to show himself to investigators by 6pm as if he's a truant schoolboy. This is exactly what a single-judge vacation bench of the Calcutta High Court ordered Trinamool Congress general secretary and Lok Sabha member Abhishek Banerjee on Thursday to attend the CID's office at its headquarters, Bhabani Bhavan in South Kolkata, by 6 p.m. and cooperate with the investigation into the alleged signature forgery which has split the Trinamool Congress party from within.

It is not a court order of business as usual. What is happening in West Bengal is the fast unraveling of a political machine that had ruled India's third most populous state for 15 years with an iron fist. The forgery of signatures is simply the wound that can be seen. The disease under is institutional and has been incubating for years.

The Faux Federal Election Petition.

The controversy had exploded following a letter to the Speaker demanding the recognition of senior TMC MLA Sovandeb Chattopadhyay as Leader of Opposition which allegedly had forged signatures of several legislators. The Assembly Secretariat filed an FIR and the state's Criminal Investigation Department (CID) took over. It's the beginning of the story, but not the end.

The controversy is over a Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee's Kalighat residence where a meeting was held on giving names to the Leader of Opposition. There have been claims that several MLAs had their signatures affixed on some of the documents when they were not present at the meeting.

So the two legislators who blew the whistle, Ritabrata Banerjee and Sandipan Saha, were punished quickly. They were subsequently ousted out from the Trinamool Congress for "anti-party activities. For TMC, anti-party has been a term that has been synonymous with anyone who calls into question those in charge.

But the expulsion failed to quell the rebellion. It amplified it.

The party leader, Ritabrata Banerjee, formally came to the fore as Leader of Opposition in the houses of the Legislative Assembly of West Bengal, with significant number of TMC lawmakers on his side. He claimed that the newly formed legislature TMC group comprises of 58 MLAs who were elected on the party's symbol. In comparison, the TMC had returned just 80 seats in the 2026 state election — that is about 72 per cent had rebelled against the party leadership's preferred choice for the opposition's top job.

The Abhishek Problem

Based at the centre of all this is Abhishek Banerjee nephew of Mamata Banerjee, the Diamond Harbour MP and the man believed to have been the mastermind behind the TMC's organizational activities and the party's hardline poll strategy. For years he was the enforcer, the modernizer, the one who introduced a corporate management approach to a party with feudal political instincts. He was also, to many within the party, an imposition; one whose right to rule came not from ballot, but from bloodline.

The rebel group had pointed out that it did not accept that number 2 in the party, TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee, has any role in the functioning of the legislature party.

"In some measure that sorry state to which the party has been reduced is a failure on the part of Abhishek Banerjee, after all, if he could take the credit when the party was at its zenith, he has to take the blame when the party is at its nadir too," one rebel legislator said simply.

With this CID probe, Abhishek now finds himself dead centre of the forgery investigation. And the court has run out of patience with his delays. The bench said that it would not allow him to elude summons thrice as Abhishek Banerjee had already done the same thrice. He would have to come to the CID office and face interrogation by 6 p.m. But for the next 21 days the bench also granted him “conditional interim protection” from any coercive police action including arrest.

The 3 dodge speaks for itself. When the CID came to call him on June 1, Abhishek sent a letter saying that he was attacked while attending a political programme in Sonarpur and was resting on medical advice and therefore could not come for questioning. The CID rejected his request and issued him a second notice requesting his presence on June 8. Later, Abhishek filed a writ petition in the Calcutta High Court, which did not agree to consider his request for early hearing of the writ petition. It was not seen at the Diamond Harbour MP on Monday. Following this, the CID served another notice, asking him to appear by 12 p.m. on Tuesday, but he didn't turn up.

Three summons. Three no-shows. This is not a coincidence, but a pattern.

The title of the piece makes it clear that the accused is not to be exonerated by history.

It is not the first time the investigative agencies have come across Abhishek Banerjee. He had been summoned by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate in another legal tussle related to the West Bengal teachers' recruitment scam, which led to arrest of several ministers in the TMC. The Supreme Court refused to quash an order passed by the Calcutta High Court which permitted the CBI and Enforcement Directorate to summon him for questioning in the West Bengal teachers' recruitment scam case, saying to do so would put a "straightjacket" on the investigation at an early stage. Earlier, he was summoned for questioning in the coal pilferage scam, in which the Enforcement Directorate had issued summons to Banerjee for questioning under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act in connection with the Enforcement Directorate's probe into the coal pilferage scam.

The legal playbook was the same each time a challenge to the summons, a request for urgency, a request for more time, ultimately a concession. The Bengal political class has always viewed the Investigative Summons as a negotiating tool to be used as such, instead of a legal obligation. But what's different this time is that the agency probing Abhishek isn't the CBI or ED which TMC had termed as the BJP's “political weapons” but the state's own CID in a West Bengal government that was formed by the very BJP which defeated the TMC in April 2026.

A Choice That Made a Difference

The BJP in Bengal has turned history by winning 207 of the 293 declared seats and reducing TMC to 80. The result, after a record number of voters turned out to vote, was the end of 15 years of Mamata Banerjee's rule which had permanently transformed the state's political economy.

The magnitude of the collapse was astounding. In 2021, the TMC had won 215 seats. By 2026, the same party had dwindled down to 80, losing 135 seats in just one election cycle. No party in the modern history of Bengal has fallen from such heights as this.What the numbers don't tell is the social contract that was broken. The economy of West Bengal was never strong, and the TMC had mastered its patronage government jobs, contracts, the distribution of welfare and even the jobs of organisations were all routed through the party's channels. The teachers' scam, the coal scam, the civic jobs scam they were none of them a break from this system, they were an expression of it. The alleged forgery controversy has come at a time when the Trinamool Congress is facing political turmoil after losing the May 4 Assembly elections in West Bengal, leading BJP to form a government in the state.

A Split without a Script

Indian party divisions are never "pure. The TMC fracture is not a tidy ideological fracture. In many cases, the rebels are the same people who established the same machine and the same system that they enjoy. They have in common grievance, against the power of one family, against the power of the hierarchy of the organisations that override elected legislators, against the humiliation of electoral failure blamed at least partially on poor governance and unchecked corruption.

Now, TMC is facing opposition from four fronts two parties in the state Assembly and two in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. Of course, political commentators are already likening this to the Maharashtra split in Shiv Sena, which played on the same fault line between elected leaders and organizational leadership. The rebels were victorious in Maharashtra. The rebels might not even have to in Bengal: they already have the assembly numbers.

Drawing a parallel to Shiv Sena is apt, but not exact. The split occurred in the Sena party when it was in government. The TMC split is happening in opposition, with no levers of state power to use as leverage. After the breakup, the Mamata/Abhishek group has announced the dissolution of all internal committees of the party in West Bengal and panels of all the frontal organisations. It's not a display of strength but more of a scorched earth policy: If we can't keep it, we should burn it.

The Big Question the Bengalis have to Answer

The CID investigation and the court's order to Abhishek Banerjee is not just a matter of one party politics. They are at the crossroads of two related dilemmas of Indian democracy the question of efficacy of accountability systems once the political tide turns and that of impact of governance deficits at the state level.

The per-capita income of West Bengal has always been below the national average. Electoral change alone did not draw back industrial investment that was lost to neighbouring States during the TMC period when the business community repeatedly raised issues of law and order and the political interference in business. The state's public finances are still under strain, as it has one of the highest levels of debt to GSDP in the nation. Kolkata's political skit in court is fundamentally an economic narrative about how things go wrong when resources are monopolized by the political middlemen in a state.

The signature forgery is a fairly minor crime in the grand scheme of the alleged corruption in Bengal's political system. Crimes of symbolism are important. When these elected representatives' names are signed onto a document to decide who is to lead the opposition it's not only illegal, it's a contempt of the democratic process. The fact that it allegedly came from the very top of the organization that ran West Bengal for 15 years, speaks volumes of the culture that it generated.

It looks like Abhishek Banerjee could well be brought before the CID on Thursday evening to answer their queries and he will get away from there under the protection of his conditional court order. The legal process will go on; appeals will be made, hearings will be set. But, something has already changed. The machine his and his aunt has built is no longer a machine, it is a memory, whose parts dispute it. In Bengal, the time when he can get away with it has come to an end, and the court notice to appear at 6 p.m. is the starkest evidence yet.