The Pulse | Politics | South Asia

India’s Strongest Regional Party Collapses Thanks to Modi’s BJP

Legislators of the Trinamool Congress, which ruled West Bengal for three straight terms, have left the party in droves, leaving it a mere shadow of its former self.

A Trinamool Congress wall graffiti from 2021 in Kolkata says in Bengali: “Jotoi naro kolkathi, Nabanne pher hawai choti” (conspire however much you can, the slippers will return to Nabanna, the state secretariat). TMC Chief Mamata Banerjee is known for always wearing flip-flops, which is seen as a mark of her spartan lifestyle.

In one of the most remarkable political developments in recent decades, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), one of the major forces in the opposition INDIA bloc, collapsed in just about a month after it lost the West Bengal legislative election to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Twenty TMC parliamentarians have aligned with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), helping the Modi government gain numbers at a time when they are desperately seeking a two-thirds majority in the parliament. A two-thirds majority allows for constitutional amendments, which the BJP wants to carry out on several contentious issues like redrawing parliamentary constituency boundaries and simultaneous elections for parliament, state assemblies, and local self-governments.

While the NDA has inched closer to a two-thirds majority in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament, the TMC rebels’ support brings their strength to 313 in the lower house, the Lok Sabha. This is still short of the 362 seats it needs to amend the constitution.

Founded in 1998 by Mamata Banerjee, a firebrand streetfighter politician, the TMC governed West Bengal from 2011 to 2016 with a 63 percent majority and from 2016 to 2026 with a 73 percent majority in the state legislative assembly. It was India’s strongest regional party; no regional party has been able to wield the clout TMC did in West Bengal, or in opposition politics. Indeed, the TMC exercised immense influence on India’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Bangladesh.

However, in the recent state assembly elections, the TMC suffered a huge setback. It lost power to the BJP in West Bengal. Not only did it win just 27 percent of seats in the state assembly, but also several of its sitting ministers and legislators, including Banerjee, were defeated.

The party began to hemorrhage thereafter.

Fifty-eight of the TMC’s 80 legislators in West Bengal announced that they were forming a separate bloc, led by a leader the party had just expelled. The Assembly speaker acknowledged the breakaway faction as the TMC legislative party — a move that the TMC has challenged in court.

TMC parliamentarians began quitting thereafter. Twenty of its 29 members in the Lok Sabha exited.

To avoid anti-defection laws, the rebel MPs merged their faction with a hitherto unknown political party, the Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI), which had only 90 followers on its Facebook page before people suddenly got to know of its existence. It does not have a website.

This obscure party, thanks to support from the TMC rebels, is poised to emerge as the second-largest constituent in the NDA, overtaking well-known regional parties like the Telugu Desam........

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