TMC Symbol Frozen: Mamata Banerjee's Party Faces an Uncertain Future

The Election Commission has frozen both the name and the election symbol of the All India Trinamool Congress, a development that strikes at the very core of the political identity Mamata Banerjee built over nearly three decades. Both the Mamata Banerjee and Ritabrata Banerjee factions have been asked to submit three proposed names and symbols. The Mamata Banerjee faction has been allotted the name 'Mamata All India Trinamool Congress', along with the symbol of a football player — a nod to the party's familiar 'khela hobe' slogan.

The party's original symbol, the 'Jora Ghash Phool', was drawn by Banerjee herself at MS Flats, the multi-storeyed residential complex in Delhi where she used to stay. On 17 December 1997, Mukul Roy carried a sketch of the symbol to the Election Commission, sealed it in an envelope with a letter, and submitted it. On 2 January 1998, the All India Trinamool Congress received recognition from the Commission along with that hand-drawn symbol. Photographs from that period in the archives show the late Ajit Panja, Mani Shankar Aiyar, the late Mukul Roy, Ratan Mukherjee and Banerjee — capturing the time when the party took shape as her own political organisation.

In Nandigram, the former West Bengal chief minister had decided not to contest the upcoming bypoll, and her party announced that Sanchita Pradhan Dey, a former teacher, would be its candidate. Dey withdrew her candidature on Friday, two days after the last date for filing nominations. She also met Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari to discuss defecting to the BJP. Adhikari said he had nothing to do with the matter, and that if the Trinamool Congress is breaking into three or four factions, it is a sign of the party lacking cohesion. These developments, he said, have shattered Banerjee's pride.

Addressing a press conference on Friday, Banerjee claimed every successive incident proves that the BJP is destroying democracy and wants to end the Trinamool once and for all to clear its path. She also spoke about Indira Gandhi, noting that her party too went through the hassle of changing its name and symbol thrice before settling on the final one.

The party Banerjee created gradually rose to a significant position in Indian politics. She became Railway Minister twice — first during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and later in the Manmohan Singh-led UPA-II. The party's growth was fuelled primarily by its anti-CPM struggle. Banerjee became the political face of the sentiment against the party that ruled Bengal for decades, and eventually succeeded in removing the CPM from power. Several Congress leaders had tried before her — Pranab Mukherjee, Barkat Ghani Khan Choudhury, Ashoke Sen, Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi and others — but none succeeded. When she swept to power in Bengal in 2011, it was perhaps the greatest achievement of her political career.

Over the next 15 years, however, structural decay set in. When the CPM was in power, many of the Congress's lumpen elements and goons gradually entered the party system; when the TMC took over, many of those same elements moved into the new ruling party. In power for three terms, Banerjee herself perhaps could not fully understand the extent of the erosion. Then Abhishek Banerjee, her nephew, emerged as a youth leader. Initially, the organisation was built around the youth structure, and he gradually rose to become general secretary of the All India Trinamool Congress. The party began seeing a corporatisation and voters began feeling alienated. In district after district, corruption entered the TMC leadership structure, and extortion and syndicate politics became part of the political vocabulary associated with the party — in some ways resembling what happened in Bihar when the Lalu Yadav regime eventually came to an end.

Banerjee is now 75 years old. She remains physically active and is once again planning to revamp the party, considering district-wise campaigns and other steps. But there is an important historical point: when she managed to defeat the CPM, the BJP did not have the organisational capability it has today. The Vajpayee-Advani period was still one of coalition governments, without a clear majority for the party. Then the BJP came to power on its own in 2014 and began trying to expand into areas where it traditionally had little or no organisational base. Amit Shah, when he became BJP president, spoke about making the party truly pan-Indian. The party subsequently expanded in the Northeast, including Assam and Tripura, and after those successes became even more aggressive in West Bengal. Now, for the first time since 1947, the BJP has come to power in West Bengal under the leadership of Suvendu Adhikari.

All eyes will now be on how long it takes for anti-incumbency against the BJP to emerge. The BJP has only recently come to power and is still in what can be described as a political honeymoon period, so the opposition space is limited at present. But if it begins to open up after five years, who will occupy it? The TMC divide, in one sense, is in the BJP's interests, and party leaders are also saying that the split is the result of a BJP conspiracy. There is also a counter-argument: of course the BJP will do what is politically advantageous, but the real question is whether the TMC itself has the organisational immunity to survive once it is out of power. If a party loses power and immediately begins to break apart, that raises a much larger question about its internal strength. One thing is clear: the TMC's future presents a very grim and cloudy picture, and it will need all of Mamata Banerjee's political — and drawing — skills to change this.