On June 9, compounding her significant woes, police arrived at Mamata Banerjee’s house in connection with a case filed against her over the forgery of signatures of legislators who had supported her. It solidified her abject isolation in this odd moment.

The collapse of the Trinamool Congress was as spectacular as its formation, driven by a striking organisational irony. The TMC began in 1998 as a breakaway force led by a rebellious Mamata Banerjee against the parent Congress. Decades later, its disintegration was accelerated from within when a turncoat with negligible independent popular support turned against the leadership that had trusted and elevated him. 

The rapid institutional dissolution of a party that dominated West Bengal politics for 15 years represents something far deeper than a conventional electoral reversal, defying the standard cyclical volatility of democratic politics. What has happened to TMC is more elementary than the fortunes lost by the Congress after the Emergency and the Left in Bengal. It is the fall of a ruling ecosystem that had forgotten how to exist outside power.

The most brutal part of this collapse came not in Kolkata but in New Delhi. After the Assembly election defeat, TMC’s residual national relevance depended almost entirely on its parliamentary strength. Even after losing Bengal, Mamata Banerjee could still claim a national role as the leader of one of the largest non-Congress opposition parties in parliament. This last platform collapsed when the legislative rebellion replicated itself at the national level on June 8, 2026, unfolding directly in New Delhi, barely a kilometre away from the Constitutional Club where Mamata Banerjee was attending an opposition INDIA bloc meeting.

Coordinated by Suvendu Adhikari and Biplab Deb, a faction of approximately 14 Lok Sabha MPs convened an operational meeting at the residence of Union Minister Bhupender Yadav before transitioning to a highly visible public gathering at the Delhi home of TMC’s Satabdi Roy. Led by veteran MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, this group formally petitioned Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla for institutional recognition as a distinct legislative bloc aligned with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.

Given that the TMC held seats in the Lok Sabha, this 20-member faction successfully crossed the critical two-thirds mark necessary to achieve protection under the anti-defection law, a manoeuvre heavily facilitated by Adhikari’s pre-existing relationships with wealthy and influential representatives from key border districts like Murshidabad.

The reported breakaway faction includes a substantial list of prominent parliamentarians, including Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Satabdi Roy, Deepak Adhikari, Yusuf Pathan, Rachana Banerjee, Prasun Banerjee, Abu Taher, Khalilur Rahman, June Maliah, Bapi Halder, Partha Bhowmick, Arup Chakraborty, Kalipada Saren, Sharmila Sarkar, Asit Mal, Jagadish Basunia, Sajda Ahmed, Mitali Bagh, and Pratima Mondal.

The rebel MPs framed their institutional departure through a moral and political vocabulary, with Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar publicly criticising the centralised influence of Abhishek Banerjee’s unelected advisers, systemic corruption within the state’s ration distribution and teacher recruitment systems, and a restrictive internal party culture.

TMC’s national structure also suffered an additional institutional blow with the formal resignation of veteran Rajya Sabha MP Sukhendu Sekhar Roy from both Parliament and the party. Roy explicitly cited the leadership’s total lack of post-defeat introspection, broader governance failures, and the administrative handling of the R.G. Kar Medical College crisis as the........

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