Anyone who was present in Kolkata after May 5, 2026, would have certainly noticed the following. The familiar Jora Phool flags were replaced with Komola Phool less than an hour after noon on May 5, at every auto, rickshaw, bus, and labour union stand. The BJP flag now flies high above every building where erstwhile TMC strongmen resided. The Bengal film industry, too, changed its stance over the BJP, resolving to accommodate many of its own dissidents who had been sidelined due to their affiliation with the saffron party. And most recently, Ritabrata Banerjee emerged at the head of a faction claiming the support of at least 60 TMC MLAs, while 20 rebel TMC MPs formally moved towards the NDA by seeking recognition of their merger with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India.
Even though regional parties have faced similar skating defeats in the recent past, be it Naveen Patnaik’s BJD, K Chandrashekar Rao’s BRS, YSR Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSRCP, and even Stalin’s DMK, none of these parties faltered and collapsed so quickly. Count AITC’s Falta candidate, Jahangir Khan, who unilaterally withdrew from the ECI-mandated re-polling in the constituency a day before. Despite being known to be an Abhishek loyalist, Jahangir succumbed to the need to thaw with the new BJP government in Kolkata.
Yet none of this explains why the TMC collapsed with such astonishing speed. The answer lies in a peculiarly Bengali institution: the party-society. A political culture where party offices in every neighbourhood are treated as one-stop centres for all daily problems, arbitration, permission and interaction with the government. The TMC had inherited the Left-created party-society when it came into power in 2011. The plethora of labour unions, trade associations, clubs and party-offices that act as a para-legal institution ensured party hegemony through a mix of patronage, threat or coercion. Then, the party-offices operated as ex-officio courts, handling state affairs from local tenders to property disputes, from mouthpieces of the TMC via Duare Sarkar to Aadhar form fill up, from delivering Lokkhir Bhandar to turning up voters on the polling day.
But inheriting the system was one thing; sustaining it was another. Unlike the Left’s ideological cadre, TMC local leaders and party workers who integrated into and ran the party-society institutions depended on the institutions of the party-society – like auto/rickshaw unions, bazaar committees, etc – on providing monetary incentive to leaders, ie, a chain of patronage to keep hold of local party workers and muscle men who constituted the regime’s rule of violence, at the same time lining their own pockets. Turning a blind eye to corrupt practices of cut-money, hawala, ‘protection-money,’ extortion, illegal land acquisition, construction materials, dubious local tenders and so on and so forth.
This produced a second weakness. TMC local leaders focused more on a franchisee model of politics, where votes were not sought for local MLAs but for Mamata herself. For example, the 2021 West Bengal Legislative Assembly elections saw posters for TMC that didn’t even have local candidate names, but only had Mamata’s face with ‘Bangla nijer mayekae chai’ (Bengal Wants its own daughter) written over them. However, this kind of dependence only works when the relationship between leadership and governance is intact. Say, the Gujarat Model of Modi that offered a good blend of both. In West Bengal’s case, there was no comparable model as such. What was there was basically a model that made the CM remain mum when crimes happened in the constituency of TMC MLAs or when the wives of BJP workers were raped in broad daylight in the aftermath of 2021. Hence, governance and leadership failed the franchisee model in TMC’s case. That when the brand image is damaged, franchisees suffer, looking for new endorsements.
Yet organisational decay was only part of the story.
An anti-BJP stance cannot be a party ideology, much less an electoral strategy. In the run-up to the 2021 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee said: ‘Bengal will be run by the people of Bengal. Not by outsiders.’ and that the BJP was ‘more dangerous than the Maoists.’ Voters rarely buy conspiracy. With leaders like Suvendu Adhikari, Dilip Ghosh, Samik Bhattacharya and Agnimitra Paul at the BJP forefront, such assertions of the BJP being an ‘outsider party’ collapsed. The BJP also offset this by reminding Bengalis that the founder of Jan Sangh, BJP’s political ancestor, was Dr Shayama Prasad Mukherjee, a Bengali bhodrolok himself.
None of this absolves the leadership itself. Empowering local leadership with autonomy does not absolve party leaders of responsibility for corruption. Ignorance and complacency are nothing short of conspiracy. Party leaders cannot say that they were unaware and so are not responsible, like Mamata did. Even in the July 2022 SSC scam, Mamata denied responsibility, calling it a collusion by opposing parties. Voters cannot be won over every time by party leaders. Good governance accounts for better steps. Overlooking corruption is akin to enabling it.
Above all, there was the question of power. The lack of inner-party democracy can be seen as the final nail in the coffin. In any organisation, decentralisation of power is essential to enable a party that could reflect a democracy as huge as India. Yet, the reliance on either Mamata or Abhishek (Pisi-Bhaipo) as the only sources that could make the party win in a state like West Bengal, to avoid factional infighting from allowing party splits. From Mamata being elected chairperson unopposed, to appointing Abhishek as General-Secretary, to forgoing any consultative process for party office appointments and Mamata’s unilateral decisions administered the party. Plural opinions were discouraged and resistance delegitimised. High-handed rule by a dominant coterie or dynastic family is bound to leave out others at the fringes without involvement in party decisions. Candidates for elected offices must not only be counted by the traction they attract or loyalty to the leaders, but also in their commitment to the party as a collective.
In the end, the lesson is a simple one. People do vote for welfare, but not at risk of their lives, livelihoods and dignity. For TMC, doles took precedence over women’s safety, jobs, education and healthcare. Doles work till people ask for real long-term solutions to hardships. Didi’s sops failed to answer the aspirations of voters.
