What’s happening with the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) may be a textbook example confirming the argument that regional parties are falling apart and politics in India is becoming more about national parties, in this case the BJP and the Congress. The realignment of Indian politics, moving toward national consolidation at the expense of regional forces, is exactly what is driving the crisis around the TMC. Sources claim that the Samajwadi Party is also getting jittery, worried about something similar happening to it, especially with the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections around the corner.
Mamata Banerjee’s TMC (if it can be called that given its current state of affairs) is not the only one to have faced this situation in the recent past. Before it, there was Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena and Sharad Pawar’ NCP. They both suffered the same fate when they split wide open a couple of years ago in Maharashtra. Even though Uddhav was in power, he could not save his party.
More recently, the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP has faced issues, but in Odisha, the Naveen Patnaik-led BJD is also facing a crisis at multiple levels. The most immediate factor is the psychological and organisational impact of the defeat in the 2024 Odisha Assembly elections, which ended Patnaik’s nearly 25-year-long uninterrupted rule. Observers say regional parties such as the TMC, the BJD, and the Shiv Sena function through a centralised structure built around individual leaders; once the leaders become vulnerable, so does their carefully nurtured chain of command.
Electoral successes suppress factionalism and dissent, but the loss of power alters that. Leaders who previously remained silent begin openly expressing dissatisfaction over various issues: access to leadership, political relevance, internal decision-making, and nepotism. In the case of the TMC, the domino effect was triggered by Banerjee’s action against senior leader and four-time MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, what followed was unprecedented and historic.
Observers say the TMC meltdown basically proved that regional parties face structural stress once they lose control of power. State-level defeats expose problems that were earlier masked by electoral victories, such as weak second-line leadership, factionalism, cadre drift, and uncertainty over the future and succession.