Trinamool Congress at 28: From Anti-Congress Birth to an Existential Crossroads
The Trinamool Congress, launched in 1998 against the Congress, has come full circle as Mamata Banerjee faces an existential crisis 28 years later.
The Trinamool Congress was founded on January 1, 1998, marking the start of a political project built in opposition to the Congress. At the time, Mamata Banerjee argued that the Congress was not equipped to take on the Left alliance in West Bengal, and the new party was positioned as the alternative force capable of that fight.
Twenty-eight years later, the party's trajectory has come full circle. Banerjee now finds herself navigating an existential crisis, a situation that has renewed attention on the relationship between the Trinamool Congress and the Congress — a relationship that has moved through phases of friendship, rivalry and reconciliation over nearly three decades.
The arc from a party born to oppose the Congress to one whose political future is again being read alongside its ties with the grand old party underlines how much the ground in West Bengal has shifted since 1998. What began as a breakaway aimed at the Left has evolved into a long, often turbulent association with the very party it was created to challenge.
That history now frames the present moment for Banerjee and her party, as questions about the Congress-Trinamool equation return to the centre of national and state politics.