Obituary to Political Career of Mamata Banerjee

Future of Mamata Banerjee

(Chapter 8)

Mamata Banerjee was Chief Minister of West Bengal for 15 years. She has no development work to her credit, no women, or poor empowerment scheme to her credit. She built no school, college, hospital, or even a fishpond in her State in her entire tenure. What she built was a lethal criminal racket expert in rigging elections and winning her one election after another.

West Bengal has a 27 percent Muslim population, concentrated enough in certain districts to be decisive in a significant number of seats. Mamata Banerjee built her coalition around this base with methodical consistency. Imam stipends. Minority scholarships. Festival accommodations. A 145 crore self employment scheme specifically for Muslims in 2011. OBC quota adjustments that shifted benefits toward minority communities. She secured approximately 80 percent of Muslim votes in Muslim heavy seats, which is not a voting preference. It is a bloc.

She did not lose this election on May 4. She lost it the day she said “in one second, they will finish you off completely” at a public rally. She lost it the day she protected Shahjahan Sheikh while the women of Sandeshkhali waited. She lost it the day she restricted Ram Navami processions. She lost it the day she imported 9 million votes between 2016 and 2021 and called it democracy. She lost it across fifteen years of decisions that treated 70 percent of her state’s population as a problem to be managed rather than people to be governed.

She was making money even from selling tickets of her party for elections @ 5 crores each, if we believe ex cricketer Manoj Tiwari.

BJP did not win this election. Mamata lost it. BJP was the available alternative.

Now What?

Ekla Chalo Re

Mamata Banerjee refused to concede the elections result and did not follow the convention of resigning. She was thrown out of office on 7th May by the Governor who dissolved the assembly under article 174(2)(b) of the Constitution of India.

New Chief Minister of West Bengal will be sworn on 9th May 2026, the birthday of Gurudev Tagore. For Mamata it will be time to sing: ekla chalo re. There are multiple reasons for her solitude. The very first reason is the precedent that in West Bengal, a party ousted for power, vanishes into oblivion, eventually.

Mamata Banerjee herself has stated in the press conference held on 5th May that she has no intention get elected in assembly and become VIP. She expressed desire to become LIP or less important person. She will help the opposition to strengthen the INDI Alliance in the center. Hilarious as she did not concede one seat to the alliance members in 2024 elections to the Parliament. Who will want her there?

Another reason is that Muslims do not like to sit in opposition. They will find the new power centre.

Muslim political behaviour in India has rarely been about ideology. It has been about protection and access to power. Mamata Banerjee provided both for fifteen years. BJP now controls both. The transaction will be renegotiated with the new government and Mamata Banerjee will watch it happen from 81 seats.

This is the final and most personal betrayal of her strategy. She subordinated governance, alienated 70 percent of her population, accumulated 7.7 lakh crore in debt, protected criminals, restricted Hindu festivals, shut down Hindu temples, and threaten them loudly at rallies. She did all of this to hold a coalition together. And the coalition will dissolve within months of her losing power because it was never about her. It was about proximity to whoever holds the keys.

She will be left with the consequences of every decision she made and none of the political cover that made those decisions survivable. The MLAs who stayed with her through the counting will begin their own calculations by next week.

Ekla chalo re was written for people who walk alone because they are right.

Mamata Banerjee will walk alone because she is the left. And alone.

When Left Has Left Nothing Is Left.

When the Left politically departed in 2011 they left nothing behind. No institutions. No economy. No civic culture. Only debt and a running oppression machine.

When Mamata’s left leaning appeasement politics has now been rejected, it too leaves nothing. No legacy. No achievement. No infrastructure. Only 7.7 lakh crore in debt and 98 seats clustered in Muslim majority bastions.

And literally, when what remains of the left of centre political tradition in Bengal, CPM, TMC, the entire apparatus of minority appeasement and identity politics, has exhausted itself, nothing of that tradition remains standing in the state that was once its proudest demonstration.

Three generations of left politics in Bengal. 34 years of CPM. 15 years of Mamata Banerjee.

Mamata Banerjee does have a contribution in the political history of India. She does not realise it. She united ‘Hindu’ which was never a political entity.

Hindu Construct

Hindu is not an identity in the way Muslim or Christian is an identity. It has no single book, no single prophet, no single mandatory practice, no unified clergy, no excommunication, no mechanism of enforcement. It is the world’s most internally diverse religious category. A Shaivite and a Vaishnava have less in common theologically than a Catholic and a Protestant. A Brahmin and a Dalit have spent centuries in structured opposition. A Bengali Hindu intellectual who drinks whisky and eats hilsa and quotes Tagore shares almost nothing culturally with a Rajasthani Hindu vegetarian who has never left his district.

Political scientists have argued for decades that Hindu consolidation is impossible for exactly this reason. The category is too large, too contradictory, too internally fractured to behave as a voting bloc. BJP itself spent thirty years trying to build it through temple politics, cow protection, cultural nationalism, and never fully achieved it anywhere at this scale.

Mamata Banerjee achieved it in fifteen years without trying. Without a single strategy aimed at consolidating Hindus. Through pure provocation.

Her dialogue about finishing people off in one second reached the whisky drinker and the teetotaller equally. The Ram Navami restriction angered the devout and the culturally Hindu atheist equally. Sandeshkhali reached the feminist and the traditionalist equally. Bangladesh reached the secular intellectual with family across the border and the religious conservative equally.

She found the one thing that fits inside every version of Hindu identity simultaneously. The feeling of being unprotected in your own home.

That feeling has no caste. No dietary preference. No theological requirement. It is the only truly universal Hindu experience she could have manufactured and she manufactured it at scale across fifteen years.

65 percent of Hindu votes is not a political achievement. It is an anthropological event. It has never happened before because the thing that produced it has never happened before at this scale and duration in a single state.

India will be studying West Bengal 2026 for many generations.

BJP got 45 percent of total votes in West Bengal. 70 percent out of total voters are Hindu. Which means BJP captured approximately 65 percent of Hindu votes across a state where Hindu voters had never voted as a consolidated bloc in living memory. Not under the Congress. Not against the CPM. Never.

Mamata Banerjee accomplished something that decades of BJP organisation alone could not have accomplished. She taught Bengali Hindus, who are argumentative, factional, divided, linguistically proud and historically resistant to any single political identity, to vote as one.

The numbers now tell the complete story of reverse polarisation in a single equation. 27 percent Muslim population voting approximately 80 percent TMC produces roughly 22 percent of total votes. BJP’s 45 percent came overwhelmingly from the remaining 70 percent Hindu population. The Hindu vote did not split between BJP, Congress, CPM and others the way it historically always had. It consolidated with a efficiency that mirrors the Muslim consolidation Mamata Banerjee had built her entire strategy around.

She created the template. They used it.

The Achievement of Mamata Banerjee

A civilisation that survived Partition, 34 years of CPM, 15 years of Mamata Banerjee, and still had enough cultural memory left to cook begun bhaja with panch phoron and send its sweets across the country even when it could not afford WiFi.

When that civilisation felt simultaneously unprotected in its own home, it did something it had never done before. It voted as itself. Not as castes. Not as classes. Not as bhadralok versus rural. As itself.

That is an anthropological event because it required the dissolution of internal divisions that are centuries old. Mamata Banerjee did not just lose an election. She accidentally conducted the largest social experiment in modern Indian history and produced a result that no political scientist predicted and no BJP strategist could have engineered alone.

The Karma has Arrived

There is a saying. Gareeb ki hai mat lena. Do not take the curse of the poor. It does not require a new government to deliver it. It does not wait for elections.

West Bengal BJP President Samik Bhattacharya stated before the results that 95 percent of political murders in West Bengal in the last three years were TMC workers killing each other. Families of TMC’s own victims were approaching BJP demanding CBI investigation because they had no faith in the state police or CID that Mamata Banerjee controlled.

The machine she built to suppress others had turned on its own operators. The extortion networks had no opposition left to prey upon so they preyed upon each other. The booth level strongmen who had terrorised opposition voters were being killed in internal disputes over money and territory by other booth level strongmen from the same party.

In Chapter 6, I wrote that Mamata Banerjee was running a criminal racket. The AI in its error checking winced at it in a digital way. Now the prophetic use of that word is vindicated beyond any doubt. For the past three days TMC workers are ransacking TMC offices, appropriating resources before finding a way out of the state and before the clampdown of the new government begins. Congress party politicians are snatching back the election office which was snatched from them by TMC.

A political party whose workers spend the first 72 hours after losing power looting each other’s offices and ransacking each other’s properties is not unwinding as a political organisation.

It is unwinding as a criminal enterprise whose central command is disabled. What looks like chaos on social media is actually rational behaviour. Every node is acting in its own interest because the only thing that ever aligned them was Mamata’s ability to reward loyalty and punish defection. That ability ended on May 4. The Winding up continues.

The 15,000 poor victims of post poll violence in 2021 are still waiting for justice. Their curse is already in operation at multiple levels. Gareeb ki hai does not hurry. The victims finally have a government willing to open the files.

Inside her party as TMC workers are looting each other over the empire she built. The police Mamata Banerjee thought she owned is waiting in sidelines till a murder or arson is suspected. Later they will blame absence of clear instructions, like they did for 15 years. The machinery of denial runs on habit even after the operator is gone. TMC gets its payback in multiple ways.

She has also established personal enmity with Suvendu Adhikari as few trained sharpshooters chased and killed his close aide Chandranath Rath on May 6, 2026. A BJP member Arjun Singh has accused her nephew Abhishek Banerjee for plotting the same. Proved or not, the criminal history will never absolve her and her nephew from the allegation. Aunt and nephew have made it personal. That is a different and more dangerous kind of political problem.

She will have time to reflect on both. She will have a great deal of time now.

Meanwhile, Mamata Banerjee will be singing. Ekla chalo re. Walk alone. The song written for a different kind of solitude, the solitude of moral courage, now becomes the anthem of political abandonment. Tagore would have appreciated the irony even if he would not have approved the circumstances that produced it.

Mamata will be compelled to walk alone. Her achievement is her misery. Her misery knows no healing.

When she left, she left nothing behind.

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