The Election Commission‘s interim decision to bar both rival factions from using the All India Trinamool Congress name and its “Flowers and Grass” symbol in the October 6 bypolls has turned what began as an internal power struggle into a direct battle over the party’s electoral identity. The poll panel has asked both sides to use temporary names and symbols until it takes a final decision on their competing claims.
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For the first time since the TMC began contesting elections under its own identity in 1998, candidates claiming to represent the party are set to enter a poll without its familiar name and twin-flower symbol.
The immediate dispute is over which faction can claim the TMC’s organisational identity. But beneath that lies a larger question: who controls the political legacy of a party that has been closely identified with Mamata for 28 years?
From rebellion to the TMC
Rebellion has been central to Mamata’s political career from the beginning.
In the mid-1990s, she fought a bitter organisational battle with then West Bengal Congress president Somen Mitra over control of the state unit. Mitra retained the post. Mamata walked out.On January 1, 1998, she founded the Trinamool Congress, turning her break with the Congress establishment into the defining political project of her career.
“Life has come full circle, as we know history always repeats itself. She broke away and tried to finish off the Congress despite being born out of the Congress. Karma has strange ways of getting back at you,” a senior Congress leader told PTI.
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The gamble paid off. The TMC grew into the principal challenger to the Left Front and eventually became the political vehicle through which Mamata helped end the CPI(M)-led regime’s 34-year rule in Bengal.
The party’s symbol also carried a personal imprint. Mamata sketched the twin flowers emerging from grass, an image that became synonymous with the TMC and its grassroots politics.
That identity survived several rebellions over the years.
Pankaj Banerjee, the party’s founding chairman, left soon after its formation and returned to the Congress before eventually coming back. Ajit Panja, another founding figure, clashed with Mamata over her political strategy in 2001 and unsuccessfully attempted to build a separate platform.
Sudip Bandopadhyay was expelled after falling out with Mamata and returned years later. Subrata Mukherjee, once regarded as one of her political mentors, led a breakaway before rejoining the TMC and later serving in her cabinet.
The pattern was repeated with Dinesh Trivedi and Mukul Roy.
Trivedi’s confrontation with Mamata over the 2012 railway fare increase ended his tenure as railway minister. Roy, once the party’s organisational number two, fell out with Mamata as Abhishek Banerjee’s influence grew, joined the BJP in 2017 and later returned to the TMC after the 2021 assembly election.
Earlier rebellions tested Mamata’s authority, but none displaced her as the political centre of the organisation.
The succession question
That personalised equation came under renewed strain during the organisational turmoil of 2022, when tensions between the old guard and the younger leadership around Abhishek Banerjee threatened to develop into a wider power struggle.
Mamata responded by dissolving the existing national office-bearer committee, reasserting her position as the final arbiter of the organisation.
Political analyst Shubhomoy Maitra believes the latest rupture has exposed a vulnerability that earlier rebellions did not.
“There was little surprise involved in the disintegration of the party once it suffered electoral defeat,” Maitra told PTI, arguing that after the TMC achieved its central objective of removing the Left Front from power, it was left without “an ideological fulcrum” or “a long-term development vision for the state”.
The latest revolt has unfolded after the TMC’s defeat in the 2026 assembly election, when its strength fell from 215 of the 294 seats in 2021 to 80.
Within weeks, 58 MLAs backed expelled leader Ritabrata Banerjee as their legislature party leader. He was subsequently recognised as leader of the opposition, while Mamata’s nominee, Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, was rejected by the rebel group.
The revolt then spread to Parliament. Twenty Lok Sabha MPs, led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, announced their intention to support the BJP-led NDA and sought separate treatment as a bloc. The TMC disputed their claim and challenged the move before the Lok Sabha Speaker.
The Election Commission’s intervention has now brought the organisational dispute directly into the electoral arena. The poll panel’s interim arrangement applies to the October 6 Nandigram and Rejinagar bypolls, with both factions required to choose separate names and free symbols for the contests.
A fight over what the TMC stands for
Rebel TMC MLA Sandipan Saha has sought to give the revolt an ideological dimension, arguing that the party has drifted from the principles on which it was founded and criticising an “increasingly centralised style” of functioning.
Saha has also questioned the shrinking space for internal discussion. His criticism of dynastic politics and Abhishek Banerjee’s growing influence adds another layer to the leadership and succession battle.
The Mamata camp sees the matter differently, describing the rebels as “a bunch of traitors” and stressing that the same legislators had contested the election only months earlier on a TMC ticket.
Senior TMC leader Saugata Roy, defending Mamata’s ability to survive the crisis, described such periods as “temporary in a political life” and advised her to “wait this out”. He predicted that the rebel MLAs would eventually return to the party fold.
For now, however, the dispute has moved beyond individual leaders and competing claims over organisational control. The Election Commission has effectively frozen the party’s established electoral identity for the coming bypolls while it considers which faction is entitled to the TMC name and symbol.
For Mamata, the irony is striking. She spent her political career breaking away, building a new organisation and surviving successive challenges from within. Now, 28 years after creating the TMC, she faces a rebellion that has reached the very name and symbol that came to define her political journey.
The battle is therefore no longer only about who controls the organisation. It is also about who gets to claim the political inheritance of the party Mamata built.
