TMC 2.0 is born, but will it find a place in the Sun?

It’s official now, the Trinamul Congress (TMC) party has split, with the majority of 59 out of 80 MLAs opting out of the party founded and led by Mamata Banerjee.

However, the big question is will this new party be able to win its place in the Sun? Parties, usually, need three things to sustain ~ firstly an ideology, secondly, a charismatic leader, and thirdly, popular support.

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The questions which many are asking is ~ does the TMC 2.0, which will undoubtedly inherit the name and logo of the original TMC founded in 1998, be popular? Will it be able to inherit the support of the 41 per cent of the electorate who voted for Mamata Banerjee and her TMC in the last elections?

Questions will also swivel over whether the virtually unknown new leader Ritabrata Banerjee, (no relative of Mamata Banerjee), is charismatic enough to sustain the coup d’état against a woman who still has millions of followers? And lastly but not least, what exactly will be the new TMC’s ideology?

The original Trinamul was never a conventionally ideological party in the mould of the Communists or the BJP. Its central ideology was opposition to the Left Front and, subsequently, the political project of Mamata Banerjee herself. The party’s populism, Bengali regional pride, Leftist welfare programmes borrowed from socialist and communist parties, secular positioning and anti-CPI-M legacy were all woven together through her leadership.

The challenge for TMC 2.0 is explaining what it stands for beyond opposition to Mamata Banerjee.

If the new leadership argues that it represents a more efficient, less personalised, less family-centric version of the Trinamul, that would be an organisational argument, but perhaps not an ideology. The problem for the new formulation is that voters rarely mobilise around internal party reforms. However, they do usually mobilise around identity, aspiration, grievance or belief.

Unless the new party can articulate a compelling political narrative distinct from both the BJP and Mamata Banerjee’s camp, it risks appearing as a faction rather than a movement.

The most important uncertainty concerns who will the TMC vote-bank ultimately support. The 59 MLAs, who defected, may have won their seats on Trinamul tickets, but those votes were not necessarily cast for them individually. Many were votes for Mamata Banerjee’s leadership, welfare schemes, party symbol and political branding.

This is the central dilemma facing every political split ~ when the legislative wing separates from the charismatic founder, who owns the vote bank?

Will voters follow the organisational machinery or will they follow the leader or will they abandon both. The decisive test will come not in the Assembly head count but at the ballot box. If TMC 2.0 can demonstrate strength in municipal polls, panchayat elections and by-elections, it will gain credibility. If it cannot convert individual legislators into vote-getters, its Assembly majority may prove to be a chimera.

Indian politics offers examples pointing in opposite directions. The 2022 split in the Shiv Sena showed that control of the party organisation, legislators and symbol can provide a powerful advantage. However, even there, electoral legitimacy was and is a contested paradigm.

Conversely, many breakaway factions across India have briefly controlled legislatures only to disappear when voters returned to the original leadership.

The crucial variable is whether the founder’s personal appeal remains intact. History shows that the Congress party from which TMC was born, split several times and every time – the section which was bereft of these three props of ideological base, charismatic leader and popular support, disappeared into political oblivion.

Even the charismatic Subhas Bose’s break-away Forward Bloc, after Netaji’s death and devoid of a specific ideology, became an irrelevant “also ran”. Congress (O), which was formed after the old guard decided to part ways with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, hunted around for an ideology and leader through the 1960s only to be rendered into an “also ran” party, even though the Indira Gandhi-led Congress was denied the official symbol and party offices.

On the other hand, Mrs Gandhi’s success lay around the socialist principles she espoused along with a muscular yet secular nationalism and her own personal charisma.

West Bengal’s late Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherjee’s Bangla Congress which was founded in 1966 and led two successive governments within a short time span similarly disappeared without a trace even before it could celebrate its fifth anniversary.

The immediate question will not be whether TMC 2.0 survives next month or next year. It would be whether the new party can become something more than a coalition of legislators.

If it inherits the name and symbol, it will inherit TMC’s considerable organisational assets including perhaps its huge bank balance, fattened by electoral bond donations. However, names and symbols are ultimately nothing but claims to political legitimacy. To successfully transform the claims made by the new leadership, the party has to create acceptable political content.

To mark its presence and win its space among the electorate, the new party will have to define a political ideology that voters understand and differentiate from what Mamata Banerjee, the BJP or the Left Front espouses.

The man on the street, politicians and analysts will be on the look-out to see whether Ritabrata , a 47-year-old, who was earlier expelled from the CPI-M after having been an upper house MP and whose brief description on X reads, “A proud Bengali & Indian. Incidentally MLA from Uluberia Purba, West Bengal & 2 times Former Member of Indian Parliament,” can find enough traction among the highly argumentative people of Bengal to emerge as a leader who inspires loyalty among voters and not just numbers in the legislature.