The Parallel Government: Revenue Model of TMC.
(Chapter 10)
West Bengal under Mamata Banerjee was not a state with a corruption problem. It was a state with two governments. The first government collected taxes for the state exchequer, ran schools, built roads, administered districts, and filed returns with the Election Commission. The second government ran a parallel taxation system whose revenues went entirely to the party and its operators. The first government was the cover. The second was the business. A business comprising only of corruption.
The obituary to Mamata’s political career called it a criminal racket. Chapter 9 called it a revenue network. Both descriptions were correct and both were incomplete because neither had the numbers. The numbers are tangible with little efforts now. Delivered, one raid at a time, one video at a time, one returned envelope at a time.
The Arithmetic of Corruption The media did it best in achieving masterly inaction when it came to West Bengal. It treated Mamata Banerjee as queen of secularism in India while her government pursued sectoral vote bank politics and called non-Muslims as Kafir. She presided on a massive mafia like network allegedly managed by her nephew Abhishek and demonstrated austerity by wearing white spinster’s saree and a 100 rupee footwear and (2?) apple watches on arms. Her grip on social media was unparalleled in the world, people were arrested and placed behind bar for mentioning her name. The misdeeds of her mafia network has come out in open after a new government took over. In this article we shall attempt to assess the revenue model of the her industrial scale of corruption, conservatively estimated.
1800 illegal toll booths across West Bengal’s highways and roads. Assume that 2000 vehicles passing each booth per day. ₹50 per vehicle. 365 days a year. The arithmetic produces ₹6,570 crore per year. Every rupee in cash. No receipt. No tender. No government account. Straight to the party.
That number i.e. ₹6,570 crore per year from toll booths is not a politician taking a cut on a contract. This is a taxation system. A functioning, organised, geographically distributed taxation system operating in parallel to the constitutional one, on the same roads, from the same population, for fifteen years.
Then add the development funds. Each MP receives ₹5 crore per year in MPLAD funds. Forty-two TMC MPs over five years: ₹1,050 crore in total funds. At 20% to the party, the Niira Radia tapes established 10% as the national standard and West Bengal had its own rates, that is ₹210 crore. Each MLA receives ₹1 crore per year. Two hundred and seventeen MLAs over five years: ₹1,085 crore total. At 20%, another ₹217 crore. Development funds alone contributed ₹427 crore over five years, or ₹85 crore per year.
₹85 crore per year sounds large until you place it next to ₹6,570 crore from toll booths. The development fund cut was the entry level corruption. The apprentice’s share. The toll network was the main business. Add international cattle smuggling to Bangladesh, charges for settling incoming immigrants from Bangladesh, Toll on every construction activity including repairs and commission from every supplier of goods to the government.
This is still before counting the transfer and posting fees inside the police and administration. Before the contractor cuts on every public works project in a state spending thousands of crores annually. Before the minority scheme commissions. Before the relief material. Before the five crore for each election ticket.
The full revenue of the parallel government across fifteen years is not calculable from available evidence. What is calculable is enough window to the larger picture of a criminal empire.
The Branch Offices A parallel government collecting this kind of revenue needs local infrastructure. A police raid on the Harnett English Medium School in Kanchrapara, North 24 Parganas, revealed it.
Police recovered ₹1.77 crore in cash from a locked room in the school. The room contained a bed, an air conditioner, alcohol bottles, and condom packets. A school classroom had been converted into a branch manager’s private suite, with float cash in the cupboard and recreational facilities for after hours.
The instinct is to treat this as shocking. It is not shocking. It is logical. An organisation running a multiplication of ₹6,500 crore annual taxation network needs local nodes. The node needs a physical location. Government buildings are convenient, free, and already under the control of people who owe their positions to the network. The school was not corrupted. It was repurposed. The education it was supposed to provide was simply not the business anyone interested. What is interesting is that this repurposing was similar to the practices of Hamas in Gaza. Is that a coincidence?
The Relief Material Government relief supplies exist to reach the poor. Blankets, rice, wheat, tarpaulins etc. procured with public money or received as grant, meant for flood victims, drought victims, the genuinely destitute. In West Bengal these supplies had a different distribution system. They were distributed to TMC offices and TMC leaders’ homes, from where they could be redistributed selectively, to people who deserved them politically, withheld from general population.
After May 4, the raids began. Recovery after recovery, from homes and offices linked to TMC figures across Hooghly, Asansol, Falta, Tarakeswar. Relief material stacked in private godowns. Supplies meant for the poorest arriving in video frame next to wine bottles in a TMC-linked office.
The person who never received the blanket during the flood knew someone had taken it. They just could not say so out loud. The video made it possible to say so out loud. He is now on street with eggs in his/her hands.
The Cut Money Returns The most extraordinary footage of the post-May 4 weeks is not the cash recoveries or the relief material raids. It is the videos of TMC leaders returning cut money on camera, in open fields, handing envelopes back to the people they had extorted.
PM Awas Yojana beneficiaries receiving ₹50,000 each, handed back by the same local leader who had taken it as his processing fee. Distribution took place on camera. Do you know why? He needs evidence of his ‘honesty’ which is so uncommon. And please no eggs on him.
The Eggs, Explained Chapter 9 noted that Mamata Banerjee cannot walk freely on the streets of West Bengal. The eggs needed an explanation beyond anger. The anger was always there. What changed was the safety to express it.
Now add the economic dimension. The person pelting the egg is not only angry about Sandeshkhali or Ram Navami restrictions or the post-poll violence of 2021. They are angry about the toll booth on the road they drive every day. About the blanket that never arrived during the flood. About the ₹50,000 cut from the housing scheme money that was supposed to build their wall. About the school their child attends that had a bed and a bar in the room behind the locked door.
They knew all of this while it was happening. They could not say so. The booth level strongman was three streets away and the police were his mentors.
The booth level strongman has now either defected or gone quiet. The police are recalibrating. The files are opening. Into that sudden vacuum of coercive infrastructure, fifteen years of compressed anger found the only outlet available on a street in West Bengal in June 2026.
An egg costs ₹6 and rotten ones even less. It is the cheapest summary sentence in Indian political history which is delivered directly at target.
What ₹6,570 Crore Per Year Means It means that TMC was not a political party that also did corruption. Every party in India extracts rent from power to some degree. That is ordinary corruption and India has learned to price it into its political expectations.
What TMC built was categorically different. It was a revenue maximising enterprise that used political branding as operating cover. It was an industrial scale corruption model which left out no part of life of people.
A revenue enterprise losing power loses its only reason for existence. There is no ideology. There is no identity beyond the transaction. There is no organisational habit that survives the end of the payroll.
Sixty MLAs left in five weeks. Twenty MPs merged with a Tripura party most Indians had never heard of. Workers looted offices in 72 hours. These are not political defections. This is a collapse of facade on corruption industry that does not want to be identified with crime, after it has been exposed. They do not want to be identified with TMC or Mamata Banerjee.
Mamata Banerjee spent fifteen years building something so efficient at extraction that it forgot to build anything else. No loyalty that survives adversity. No cadre with an identity outside the transaction. No movement that outlasts the money.
In Chapter 6, the Abdali question was asked: what happens to a population that learns not to accumulate because accumulation attracts extraction? West Bengal’s people learned that lesson across fifty years of CPM and then TMC. They compressed their ambitions, hid their savings, sent their children to other cities.
The parallel government collected its taxes for fifteen years from a population that had already been bled for thirty-four years before it.
The eggs are cheap. The anger behind them is not.
In the next chapter we shall discuss the legal questions of proposed merger of the parties and implications of anti-defection laws.
References:
All chapters in this series: West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026 1800 illegal toll booths: https://www.facebook.com/dhruv.jain.33/videos/in-west-bengal-trinamool-congress-had-built-more-than-1800-illegal-toll-booths-s/1 Cash recovery from Kanchrapara school: School bedroom setup: Relief material recovery Tarakeswar: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GWPBP666ifw Cut money returned on camera: Cut money return footage: