Jun 10, 2026 15:42 pm IST

Opinion | 'Football Club': The MS Aiyar 'Joke' That Diagnosed TMC's Problem 28 Years Back

Towards the end of 1998, Mani Shankar Aiyar briefly tried the Trinamool experiment. He did not stay long. But while leaving, he offered a diagnosis that holds true even today.

Rasheed Kidwai Rasheed Kidwai Columnist

Rasheed Kidwai Columnist

Towards the end of 1998, Mani Shankar Aiyar briefly tried the Trinamool experiment. He did not stay long. Later, with his typical dry wit, he told me something that still explains the party better than many academic papers: "I did not realise that Trinamool was the fourth football club of Bengal - after Mohun Bagan, Mohammedan Sporting, and East Bengal."

It was a brilliant line because it was not merely funny. It was diagnostic.

The Trinamool Congress (TMC) was never a conventional party in the Congress, CPI(M), BJP, or DMK sense. It was an emotion before it was an organisation. A camp before it was a constitution. Its cadres did not merely support Mamata Banerjee; they inhabited an atmosphere around her - wounded pride, defiance, anti-Left resentment, street courage, cultural belonging, and an almost football-like loyalty where argument mattered less than colour.

For many years, this worked spectacularly. Mamata converted restlessness into revolt, revolt into mandate, and mandate into domination. A party founded in 1998 became the vehicle that ended 34 years of Left rule in 2011 and then retained Bengal for three consecutive terms. In its golden phase, Trinamool looked less like a party and more like Bengal's operating system.

That is why its present implosion is not just another post-defeat crisis. Political parties lose elections, such is the nature of the beast. The Congress lost power in 1977 and lived to return. The BJP lost in 2004 and lived to reinvent itself. The Left lost Bengal after three decades and still retains cadre memory, ideological habit, and organisational residue. What is happening to the TMC is different. It is not defeat alone. It is the sudden discovery that a party built on personalised power, local intimidation, welfare loyalty, and access to the state may struggle to breathe once the state is taken away.

The Speed Of Collapse

The 2026 verdict was brutal. The BJP secured a sweeping majority in West Bengal, while the TMC was reduced to around 80 seats in the Assembly after 15 years in power. Mamata Banerjee herself lost Bhabanipur to Suvendu Adhikari, a defeat heavy with symbolism because Bhabanipur had long been more than a constituency; it was part of the Mamata myth.

Yet electoral defeat, by itself, need not have destroyed the party.........

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