“In nightmares and terror, you protected me on your lap, you affectionate mother…” Ritabrata Banerjee was passionately reciting the full version of Rabindranath Tagore's Jana Gana Mana on March 9 when Mamata Banerjee abruptly cut him short.

Then a Rajya Sabha MP of Mamata’s Trinamool Congress (TMC), he was on the dais of her demonstration in Kolkata protesting the Special Intensive Revision of the voter roll. He loves to recite long poems and to intersperse poetry with political rhetoric in his speeches. That time, the party chief got impatient. “Ritabrata, give culture a break and focus on your subject, which is the SIR,” she told him. He obliged. He never had much of a say in the party in any case.

Now, in less than three months, he has spread terror among the party top brass and turned her life into a nightmare. In a chain of developments that bewildered politicians and political observers alike, Ritabrata, now an MLA in the West Bengal assembly, hijacked TMC’s legislative team from Mamata, who founded the party 28 and a half years ago and has led it since then as its undisputed leader.

On June 4, Assembly Speaker Rathindra Bose announced Ritabrata Banerjee as the leader of the opposition belonging to the TMC. This recognition came after 58 of 80 TMC MLAs submitted a letter to the Speaker, naming Ritabrata as the leader of the opposition.

Only on June 2, the TMC had expelled Ritabrata and another MLA, Sandipan Saha, for anti-party activities. Mamata had then publicly regretted having taken Ritabrata into her party after the CPI(M) had expelled him. In less than 48 hours, two-thirds of TMC MLAs backed Ritabrata. 

Saha, the other expelled MLA, is now among the deputy leaders of the rebel TMC’s legislative party, which also named Akhruzzaman its chief whip.

To grasp why all this matters, consider the timing. Barely a month earlier, on May 4, the TMC was voted out of power after 15 unbroken years and three consecutive terms governing West Bengal, routed in the 2026 assembly election by a BJP that swept 208 of the 294 seats. Mamata herself lost her Bhabanipur seat to Suvendu Adhikari, her one-time lieutenant, who was sworn in as chief minister on May 9. Now, within weeks of that defeat, the woman who built and ran the TMC for nearly three decades is watching her own legislators walk out of her grasp.

If politicians who spoke to Newslaundry on condition of anonymity are to be believed, a similar effort is on by a senior MP from one of Kolkata’s neighbouring constituencies to get 18 of 29 TMC Lok Sabha MPs together to rebel against the party leadership and claim to be the real TMC parliamentary party. They are likely to meet the Lok Sabha Speaker on June 8, seeking Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar’s appointment as the party’s Lok Sabha leader. 

Newslaundry could not reach Dastidar over the phone, but she made a curious social media post on Friday. “Do you think an MP of 4 terms from a political family , having been with @MamataOfficial, fighting autocracy for 4 decades thinks of self ? It is verdict against policy and failure of governance,” she wrote. 

She had resigned from all party posts last month after Mamata replaced her with Kalyan Banerjee as the chief whip of the party’s Lok Sabha team. Currently, Abhishek Banerjee is the leader of the party’s parliamentary team. 

Meanwhile, Mamata Banerjee has announced the dissolution of all party committees and frontal organisations across the state. This is........

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