Perhaps more than any press conference could, a single unscripted second on a Calcutta street has set the tone for how the Trinamool Congress has been operating this week. Former chief minister Mamata Banerjee hit a fellow Congressman from her very own party as he was pushing her through the crowd of her party supporters in the midst of a protest march on Wednesday, as seen in video footage that was widely spread. The clip was posted by BJP MP Raju Bista from Darjeeling with a straightforward caption that indicated that one person was trying to control the mob and make way for Mamata, who snapped and slapped her own party member. The clip quickly got repeated on local news networks in the region and by the end of the night it had become a shorthand for more than one flash of temper.

There was a good reason for the march. With the permission of the Calcutta High Court a party of Trinamool Congress activists, who decided to march from Ballygunge Phari to Hazra More in south Kolkata, walked for an hour and a half and then pleaded for their case to be heard in court. However, the march became nothing more than the sort of street show that the state is leery of, in which everyone was doing the right thing. The eggs were said to have been thrown at the event, BJP workers were chanting slogans of “thief” and TMC youth wing members were beaten by BJP workers, before the police fired a baton charge at them and dispersed the gathering on Hazra Road. In his address to the gathering Banerjee blamed the state police for its role in being "a witness to a planned rampage," and pointedly raised a question, "Is this the 'change' the people of Bengal wanted?".

That's a question that has a completely different answer now than 18 months ago, though, as the answer has already been rendered at the ballot box. During that assembly election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured a government in the West Bengal Assembly and on 9 May, coinciding with the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the state's first BJP chief minister in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ending the Trinamool Congress's 15-year rule in the state. The size of the change was stark the BJP won 206 seats in the 294-seat house, whereas the Trinamool Congress could muster 80, a majority sufficiently large to allow the new government to rule with ease without needing to employ the calculus of coalition government to balance and trim seats. Adhikari was fast on his feet, handing out cabinet portfolios and implementing central schemes like Ayushman Bharat and PM SHRI within weeks of assuming office, indicating an administration that would have nothing less than proof of its action capabilities.

The Baruipur case has emerged as a means for Banerjee's party to regain some relevance from the opposition benches but is unfolding amid a pressure of a very different, and perhaps more crippling, nature. On Monday, the Enforcement Directorate coordinated raids at five premises in Kolkata, as part of a money-laundering probe into the bank accounts of TMC and its national general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, who has been under scrutiny for using chartered planes for his party's operations. Since then, that probe has grown, The ED has frozen about ₹440 crore of the deposits held in TMC's bank accounts, an amount that puts any state unit's organisational finances to the test, not to mention one that now needs to fund its street-level revival campaign from the opposition, not the treasury benches it once ruled. To have parallel protest marches while the party you're part of is having its accounts frozen is not a pleasant place for any political movement to be, and that gives a bit of the strain that led to Wednesday's slap.

The facts that led to the march are truly horrible and nothing less. Police in Baruipur have filed four FIRs on the rape and murder of the girl and a lynching of the man suspected of being involved in the killing, and a special investigation team comprising six officers was established to further investigate the case. One of the accused was later shot dead during a police chase and this has also come under criticism from civil liberties commentators who have been wary of any shortcuts to justice despite being deeply angered by the case. The opposition's allegation, in the words of TMC leader Derek O'Brien, that government police were deployed and barricades were put up outside the Banerjees' homes to prevent them going to the family of the victim, adds another twist to the political drama in an already volatile situation, but doesn't alter the optics of a high-ranking leader losing his head in front of rolling cameras.

In all of this, there's a business cost that often doesn't get as much attention as the theatrics do. Investors have been closely observing the political turmoil in Bengal for the past two years, hoping that the new government would respect land and industrial policy promises of the previous government. A chief minister who died in custody, a party account that was frozen, street clashes which were broadcast on national television, and an opposition leader who was once chief minister exchanging blows with her own cadre are not the sort of stability message that attracts fresh capital to a recovering state whose industrial land was lost during the Singur and Nandigram years. This is supposed to have changed with the BJP government's taking over of the power but the first six months of the BJP rule has seen ED raids, encounter killings and viral videos of in-fighting marring the narrative of the investment climate in Bengal, which is not obviously better than the previous one.

The real news in the videos of Wednesday is that it's a party that doesn't quite know how to be on the losing side of government after a decade and a half in which they had all the levers. Whereas, street protest, which was a TMC forte against everybody else, is being used against the government, who knows it well and is using it in return. In that role reversal, emotions are getting frayed, cadre discipline is waning and one slap is doing what months of BJP campaigning failed to do it's taking Mamata Banerjee's temperament, rather than her opponents', into the spotlight.