After the Obituary: The TMC Bankruptcy Nobody Predicted
(Chapter 9)
The obituary to political career of Mamata was written on May 8. The critics said it was too harsh. Six weeks later, the same critics say it was too kind. Both are wrong. The obituary was accurate. It was only incomplete. It predicted political end. What actually happened was something faster and more total: a bankruptcy liquidation.
Political death and bankruptcy are not the same event.
A party that loses power goes into opposition, licks its wounds, rebuilds. A patronage economy that loses its revenue source does not go into opposition. It liquidates. Every node recalculates its position within hours, not weeks. The MLAs who stood with her through the counting were already doing arithmetic before the results finished appearing on screens.
It is the Economy, Stupid.
In Chapter 6, TMC was called a criminal racket. That description was called harsh at the time. The subsequent six weeks have provided the evidence.
What Mamata Banerjee built between 2011 and 2026 was not a political organisation in any recognisable sense. It was a revenue extraction system with political branding. The revenues had multiple streams. Development fund commissions. Contractor cuts at every level of public works. Transfer and posting fees inside the police and administration. Minority scheme commissions. Bribes for recruitment to government jobs. Booth level extortion from local businesses. And, if Manoj Tiwari is to be believed, election tickets sold at five crores each.
These streams were not incidental to the party. They were the party. The ideology was not secularism or minority welfare or any other principle she articulated at rallies. The ideology was revenue. Everyone inside the organisation understood this and participated accordingly. The MLAs, the district presidents, the block level workers, the booth level strongmen, all of them were nodes in a revenue network, not members of a political movement.
When BJP won on May 4, the revenue stopped, instantly. No time for gradual absorption. The development funds would now flow through a new administration. The transfer postings would be controlled by a new government. The contractor cuts would require relationships with different people. Toll bridges are gone. Every stream switched off on the same day.
A political party survives electoral defeat because its members share ideology, identity, or at least organisational habit. A revenue network has no such glue. When the revenue stops, the network dissolves at exactly the speed the arithmetic allows.
That speed, as it turned out, was five weeks.
The Family Refuses
There is a story most Indians know before they can read. Ratnakar was a dacoit who committed crimes for his family. When the Narada moment arrived, he asked his family whether they would share the burden of his sins. His wife refused. His sons refused. They would take the benefits. Not the sins. It flipped the Ratnakar and he became Valmiki, the Sage and adi kavi (eternal poet).
Ritabrata Banerjee leading 58 of 80 MLAs to the Assembly Speaker on June 3 with a letter nominating him as Leader of Opposition. Sudip Bandyopadhyay, described for years as one of Mamata’s closest aides, walking into Amit Shah’s office before joining the rebel camp. Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, on June 14, meeting Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to announce merger with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India, a registered party from Tripura.
Mamata Banerjee’s sister in law (Bhabhi) Kajri Benerjee shared dais in a function of Kolkata Municipal Corporation with Suvendu Adhikari. She is a former councilor of the corporation. She understands the politics better. Mamata had her ilk had boycotted the swear in ceremony of Suvendu Adhikari. Family is out of Mamata’s shadow.
Mamata’s sister in law. Sixty MLAs. Twenty Lok Sabha MPs. Three Rajya Sabha members. This is Valmiki’s family refusing. Every single one of them took the benefits for fifteen years. Not one of them is willing to share the consequences.
The Raid at 2 AM
On June 13 at 2 AM, agencies raided Abhishek Banerjee’s residence. They had mobile phone location of a wanted fugitive at Abhisheks residence. He was not found even after massive search of the premises
An aunt whose political machine has dissolved. A nephew who carries a murder allegation for the killing of Chandranath Rath, Suvendu Adhikari’s close aide, on May 6, the day after results. That allegation, proved or not, converted a political rivalry into a personal vendetta of a kind that carries different consequences than ordinary political competition. Suvendu Adhikari is now a man whose aide was killed by sharpshooters. That is not a political opponent. That is a different category of problem entirely.
The 2 AM raid is the files beginning to open. Every alternate day Abhisheck had been appearing either in the office of ED or CID for investigation. There will be more such investigations. Nobody wants to stand with him.
The Eggs
Something has happened on the streets of West Bengal that has no precedent in Indian political memory. Eggs are being pelted at Mamata Banerjee and her associates wherever they appear. Pisi and Bhaipo cannot step out freely. The long marches that built her public identity across fifty years, were her signature, are not happening. She is afraid to tread on roads. She stepped out once to the HIgh Court and was welcomed with slogans of ‘Chor, Chor’ or thief inside the safest place. Abhishek steps out of car under the shadow of an Umbrella task force which protects him from eggs.
In the state where under patronage of Mamata bombs were hurled on opponents. Car glasses of BJP President JP Naddha were broken. NOw Mamta is afraid of eggs. Abhishek Banerjee had first hand taste of eggs on face and all over body a few days ago when he visited sonpur. Mamata is not prepared to take the risk. A leader who cannot walk among her people has not merely lost an election but her leadership as well.
A political leader is pelted with eggs when two conditions are met simultaneously. First, the people must feel anger. Second, they must feel safe expressing it. For fifteen years, neither condition was fully met. The anger existed but the safety did not.
A booth level strongman who could make life difficult for making the wrong gesture in public, is now paraded half naked and taken on foot to police station. It is a parade disguised as journey. Abhishek’s right hand man Jahangir Khan who called himself Pushpa, paraded through the streets with hands folded when not on ears to apologize to every passerby. Next day he was bare foot with a rope around his waist. The machinery of suppression is not only ended by humiliating consequences are carefully demonstrated. Fear of law is restored.
The people of West Bengal have delivered their verdict at the ballot box, which in May. Now they are delivering it on the street. Police is letting people vent. It is pro-democracy. Though personally, I would prefer tomatoes. I am vegetarian. The fact that not one egg landed on a single policeman speaks volume about the quality of whole affair. People throwing are mostly middle aged women in their traditional Saree with daughters and sons. Police ignore it. Now the police has started making arrests at late night so that there is less crowd.
I had warned about it. Gareeb ki hai mat lena. Do not take the curse of the poor. The eggs are that curse arriving in its most literal form.
Speed of Liquidation
The obituary predicted she would walk alone. It was right about that. It did not predict the speed because it did not fully account for the economic architecture underneath the political one.
The thirty Muslim MLAs who left, their behaviour was explained in Chapter 8 as the renegotiation of a protection transaction with the new power centre. That explanation was correct as far as it went. It did not go far enough. They left not only because BJP now holds the keys to protection. They left because their own revenue streams inside the TMC network required proximity to government. The Revenue Network will be discussed in detail in the next chapter.
In past 6 weeks, the videos on social media have revealed what the media so obligingly concealed for 15 years. How school rooms were converted into den of carnal pleasures and storage of ill gotten cash. How every road had a goons operated tollbooth. How weapons were stashed in the houses of TMC workers. How the TMS workers were hoarding the relief material meant to be distributed to the poor in need. They hoarded tarpaulin. Imagine the depth of these TMC operative.
When I had written ‘Gundi Ran Pradhan’ this was not what I anticipated. But Mamata has fallen to depths where no one ever fell. In my book on Corruption in India, I have discussed various levels of corruption but the corruption under Mamata is something unheard of and unwritten about. In the next chapter we shall try to cover the Revenue Model of Mamata Banerjee.
References to all chapters in this series: All chapters on West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026