Bengal has experienced its first-ever split in the TMC, revealing a party whose governing structure had been insubstantial over the past 20 years, and whose economy in this state never really lived up to the rhetoric.

June 5, 2026

The swiftness with which the most powerful political machine in Bengal unravelled was almost dramatic. Trinamool Congress, which Mamata Banerjee established from scratch in 1998, has been into its first-ever parliamentary split, formally, in just over five weeks after its historic debacle in the April 2026 assembly elections.

Following this, on June 3, the Speaker of the assembly of the State of West Bengal, Rathindranath Basu, received a letter from 58 out of the 80 newly elected MLAs of the TMC, acknowledging the rebel group's selection of expelled MLA Ritabrata Banerjee as Leader of the Opposition. But not the Mamata loyalist nominated as LoP by the party establishment days ago, Not Sovandeb Chattopadhyay. Not some old fart. An ex-politician with two party expulsions (from two opposites) had entered the Bengal Assembly chamber of the Leader of the Opposition and occupied it. That's one image that requires no explication.

The Signature Forgery Allegation that Undid It All

Soon, a procedural disagreement was just the opening shot that revealed fault lines. Ritabrata Banerjee and another member of the legislature Sandipan Saha had filed a formal complaint alleging that their signatures with several other MLAs, had been forged in a party resolution document naming Sovandeb Chattopadhyay as LoP. The complaint was made public on June 1, the day the TMC expelled both of them due to alleged "anti-party activities. Responding to the new chief minister Suvendu Adhikari's announcement that "nobody who forged signatures would be spared," Mamata's camp issued the expulsion orders within minutes. Whether or not the forgery claim is conclusively supported by law, is of little consequence in the present context. The expulsion was like a match to a ball of smouldering gunpowder that had been smouldering since the election results.

Even before the Speaker was recognized, there were some indications that about 50 TMC MLAs had assembled at the MLA Hostel in Kolkata in a clandestine manner to create a dissident group which was pointed out by the former TMC spokesperson Riju Dutta. The arithmetic could not be ignored when Ritabrata secured signatures of 59 legislators, clearly a two-thirds supermajority which legally protects them from disqualification under the anti-defection clause of the Tenth Schedule. In constitutional convention the Speaker accepted the facts of numbers.

We are the "real" TMC. Three words, uttered in the corridors of the Vidhan Sabha, were to prove the most telling challenge on Mamata's path since she came to power in 2011.

The W Bengal Assembly Election 2026 Seat Distribution is presented here.

In the state BJP swept to power while TMC had only 80 seats and was immediately engulfed in an internal battle.

BJP — 207 seats

TMC — 80 seats

Others — 7 seats

The Struggle of A Gettysburg Man With Two Expulsions and Nowhere Left To Go!

It's no accident that the rebel figurehead is Ritabrata Banerjee. He was a product of the left-student politics of Bengal, and had become the all-India General Secretary of the Students' Federation of India before being nominated to the Rajya Sabha by CPI(M) in 2014, at the age of 47. He was thrown out of the Left in 2017 after being accused of having an incompatible lifestyle the image of a Communist MP enjoying a fancy lifestyle was just too much. He joined the TMC in 2020, was recalled to the Rajya Sabha in 2024, and ran his first assembly election this April in Uluberia Purba, one of the few TMC candidates to win in what turned out to be a devastating debacle for his party in the State.

When his successes are lost twice, a politician is in a sense liberated from a third potential failure. This psychological freedom is of tremendous importance in political desertions, the conventional deterrent of those being the culprits is the prospect of future irrelevance. Ritabrata, who has endured two divorces, ideologically divergent, doesn't have such an inhibitor. He had invited Mamata Banerjee to become the “chief adviser” of his legislature faction publicly in a respectful but devastating manner implying that she was welcome as a figurehead but no real power was left with her. And he made a pointed remark audible across Bengal, Abhishek Banerjee, the TMC supremo's nephew and dominant organiser of the party "has no connection with the state assembly.

TMC Legislature Split — Factional Alignment

The rebel camp had won a majority of two-thirds of the 80 elected TMC MLAs.

Rebel faction (Ritabrata) — 58 MLAs (72.5%)

Loyalist bloc (Mamata) — 22 MLAs (27.5%)

This was the problem of the Abhishek, which nobody dared to name.

If anyone has been watching Bengal politics over the last two years, they will know that the seeds of this revolt were sown not on the day of the polls, but over the past couple of years, when Abhishek Banerjee consolidated his operational control over TMC the decision of who would contest, who would lead in the districts, who would toe the line, etc. Candidates fell by the wayside in droves, with 74 sitting MLAs losing their place in 2026 among the 291 TMC candidates. Many of those who secured tickets are said to have been picked by the younger Banerjee's group, irrespective of their seniority in the old group. The resentment was never aired publicly the TMC's method of dealing with dissent is to expel.

The result of the election broke the lid. The party that won 215 seats in 2021 was cut down to 80 seats. The idea that Mamata's welfare programmes, especially the Lakshmir Bhandar cash transfer for women made the TMC untouchable was proven to be inadequate. The BJP had offered the women Rs 3,000 per month, which was double the amount being offered by TMC, making direct inroads into what was considered to be Mamata's most sure shot demographic. Persistent law and order issues, anti-incumbency due to corruption at the higher up levels and among party workers and a wave of consolidation among the Hindu community all came together to deliver a shock result that even the BJP which attacked the state with all guns blazing since the 2014 elections could not have anticipated.

As Speaker Bose was recognising Ritabrata as LoP, the Enforcement Directorate was raiding Abhishek Banerjee's home in Kolkata — a crossroads of enforcement and legislative revolt, which, in any case, could not have been more resonant.

The Economy That Lost Its Way

Numbers were a problem for the TMC even before this campaign season. The per cent of contribution to national GDP of West Bengal has fallen from more than 10 per cent in 1960s to about 5.6 per cent at present. In a March 2025 report, the NITI Aayog estimated that the real GSDP of the state has been growing at 4.3 percent each year on average between 2012-13 and 2021-22, compared with 5.6 percent at the national level, which, if continued over 10 years, results in significant economic disadvantage. Once it was a little bit better than the national average, it's now a bit less, about 20 percent less than states that, by the way, were once thought of as less developed.

The capital formation declined in recent years from 6.7 percent to less than 3 percent of the state output in 2010. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had earlier in the Parliament directly quoted that the "hostility to investment" in the state of West Bengal had given rise to a state with "no jobs, no factories, no vision. The TMC claims that the state's economy is turning around, but more than 6,600 companies have left the state in the period of 2011–2025. The state's debt-to-GSDP ratio, which is estimated to be 38 percent in FY26, is still high and above the Indian states median. Fiscal deficit for FY25 came in at around 4 percent of GSDP, above the budgeted figure, with a revenue deficit of 2.4 percent.

This is the same as the Mean of the States' indicator.

Underperformance of the structural types over a decade of TMC rule.

West Bengal (current)

India average / benchmark

It was essentially welfare escalation that the TMC did to these structural weaknesses. In 2025-26, the state budget allocated nearly Rs 1.6 lakh crore to the social sector of the total revenue expenditure of Rs 3.01 lakh crore, which was huge but failed to douse the fire of the investment drought in the social sector, thereby keeping the satisfaction indices high among some sections of the society. Bengal was in the bottom quarter in terms of ease of doing business in the country when compared with the best-performing States. Decades of leftist labour militancy had left a void in manufacturing which was never filled.

Maharashtra's Ghost Haunts the Hooghly

Comparisons with Maharashtra are not just rhetoric. Eknath Shinde's departure from the Shiv Sena, which was led by Uddhav Thackeray, in 2022, with a group of MLAs sufficient to form a government in the state, was a vindication of the grievances he had been gathering over the years against the dynastic rule over the party which represented a larger segment. The procedures were all very much the same: the two-thirds supermajority, a friendly Speaker and an opposing faction claiming organisational legitimacy while the rebel side claimed numerical legitimacy. Eventually and inconclusively, the courts ruled, further dividing the political sphere.

Now West Bengal is following the same footsteps. The Mamata camp is gearing up to challenge in courts and TMC lawyers are likely to file court objections against the Speaker's recognition. However, the timelines in courts in any case are lengthy in India and political facts on the ground are moving quickly. In Maharashtra, the damage to Uddhav was virtually permanent when there was any clarity on the legal situation. The TMC's plight is exacerbated by the fact that it is now the opposition party and does not have the levers of state governance to force reluctant MLAs to toe the party line something that was always a potent weapon for parties in power facing a defection threat.

What is meant by "Constructive Opposition"?

Ritabrata Banerjee was very cautious, almost painstakingly cautious, about using non-confrontational language about his group's role. “We will not oppose for the sake of opposition,” he said, making it clear that his team will back government policies it agrees with. He appointed deputy leaders Javed Khan, Sandipan Saha, Sabina Yasmin, and Shiuli Saha who crosscut various regional boundaries within the TMC. The conciliatory framing has several purposes: firstly, it reduces the political cost for any remaining few in TMC who might want to cross-over; secondly, it shows that the rebels are not pure opportunists but responsible actors; and thirdly, it gives them some breathing space from the allegation, which is now being made on every Bengali news channel, that the entire episode was carefully organised with the tacit approval of BJP.

That's not something that should be dismissed and should be engaged. With the BJP enjoying a huge majority of 207 seats in the state assembly, it has the incentive and the capacity to choose a divided opposition party to its detriment. From the ruling party's point of view, a faction of the TMC which sometimes backs them on controversial bills is far better than 80 MLAs in their disciplined form who oppose all government policies. If Ritabrata's group was pushed in this direction, or if the rebels have got here on their own figuring out what their chances of survival were, will be sorted out over the next year than any word of either side today.

West Bengal GSDP Growth Trend (2014-15 to 2025-26)

The nominal growth masked underlying fragility; the real per capita growth was below the national average.

Nominal growth % of WB GSDP

National GDP growth %

The Longer Question of the Centre of Gravity of Indian Democracy

But let's leave Bengal for a moment and the picture that emerges is not reassuring for those who believe in the need for strong regional parties to act as a check on the centralised national power. Wherever these dominant regional parties have been split in Maharashtra, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and now the West Bengal it has been due to a succession battle, dynastic over-reach and electoral loot. The TMC is just another. If the guy who creates a party is also the sole point of failure then the party never was an institution, it was a personality cult with administrative tentacles.

The Singapore-based Institute of South Asian Studies, noting the Bengal result, said in a statement that the victory was a sign of the BJP's "one of the few remaining opposition bastions" being lost, and that "it could have repercussions for India's federal system". That is right as far as it goes but fails to go far enough to tackle the more difficult question of why the bastions were so hollow. The TMC had been in power for 15 years and had a Rs 20 lakh crore economy to play with. It did see investment announcements at the signature Bengal Global Business Summit events but the numbers for fixed capital formation were different. Governance was effective at the level of welfare delivery (direct benefit transfer, the Duare Sarkar programme of doorstep service delivery) but failed to address the level of structural transformation to generate jobs and improve living standards sustainably.

Arguably, that failure is what set the TMC's bottom when competitive pressure came. Those who had received welfare benefits were not feeling that they were sufficiently part of the system that gave them the welfare benefits and that was why they could not digest the BJP's counter-offers. There was little economic rationale to keep the TMC going. And once the political argument (Mamata as an irreplaceable bulwark against BJP encroachment) also lost at the poll, the party had no glue to bind its own legislators together.

Mamata Where do you stand now?

At 71, she is a political survivor, a rarity in Bengal. She was able to outmaneuver the Left for 20 years before defeating them. Her party was able to establish control over a complex, multi-caste and multi-religious state for 15 years. She rode out the 2021 election losing her own seat but winning in a by-poll and maintained her coalition despite Saradha scandals, Narada, and a dozen other scandals which would have ended lesser politicians. Now she is not done.

But the nature of her political project has been transformed. She heads a small group of a party whose legislative house she lost to those whom she expelled. She now has to deal with a BJP government in her state which has the institutional levers she used to wield. She has a national profile, and a Lok Sabha presence as well 29 seats as of 2024 but the arithmetic is under pressure in the upcoming Lok Sabha cycle as well. Most important, the divide has brought a fresh breath of air to the issue of Abhishek. His hold on the party machine has led to the alienation of 58 MLAs, and now the discussion of the party's future after Mamata has been started on his own terms, and at his convenience.

That, ultimately, could be the most significant result of June 3. As much as sitting in the LoP's chair in the Bengal Vidhan Sabha doesn't really matter it's a procedural issue it's the larger message that the days of unchallenged personal authority within the TMC are done. Whether the house that Mamata built can now become something more than a house constructed around one individual will be the difference between standing or falling. The available evidence at the present time is not promising.