TMC rebels eye NDA
People don’t leave bad jobs; they leave bad bosses. This is the moral of the story that has unfolded in Bengal and Tamil Nadu in the aftermath of the elections to the Legislative Assemblies of these states. The latest news is that 20 MPs in Lok Sabha representing the Trinamool Congress have written to the Speaker stating that they are the real party and want a separate bloc in the House since they would like to be part of the NDA. The fact that Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar leads the “rebel” MPs adds to the seriousness of the situation. The TMC has 28 members in the Lok Sabha and 13 members in the Rajya Sabha. Sukhendu Sekar Roy, the party’s senior member in Rajya Sabha, tendered his resignation from the party and the House on Monday[1].
The mini-election festival held in five states in the months of April-May saw the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) scoring impressive wins in Assam, Bengal, and Puducherry, while Kerala went to the Congress-led United Democratic Front. Tamil Nadu saw an unexpected result as Joseph Vijay’s Tamilaka Vettri Katchi defeated the traditional DMK and the AIADMK to reign from Fort Saint George, the State’s seat of power. What we see after the declaration of results is a massive exodus of MLAs and cadres from Bengal’s Trinamool Congress and Tamil Nadu’s AIADMK. This substantiates one of the teachings about leadership traits: People don’t leave bad jobs; they leave bad bosses.
This is the first time a non-Congress, non-CPIM, and non-Trinamool Congress political party, the BJP, has won the polls in West Bengal, and that too after a long gap. The BJP is entering the corridors of power in Bengal for the first time. The Hindutva party won 208 out of the total 294 seats in the Legislative Assembly. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, in their whirlwind campaign tours, had asked the voters for a rose, but the latter gave them a rose garden. The Congress, the CPI (M), and the Trinamool Congress had proved their weaknesses whenever the people gave them good mandates. West Bengal, once the capital of the British colonial masters and the industrial hub of India, wears the look of an industrial and commercial graveyard as of now. Suvendu Adhikari, the new Chief Minister of the state, has his hands full with thousands of issues that need urgent action. If Adhikari ushers in “Dhana Dhanya Pushpa Bhara Bengal”, he would be swearing in again as chief minister in 2031.
The Trinamool Congress, which had monopolized power for the last 15 years and was decimated in the 2026 hustings, is yet to get over the shock defeat inflicted by the voters. Mamata Banerjee, the queen of Bengal, has had an uninterrupted run as chief minister since 2011. She should be awarded a Nobel Prize for destroying and demolishing the goodwill she had generated among the people who saw in her a ray of hope. Now it is for the BJP to resuscitate the State from the unfathomable morass into which the Congress, the CPI (M), and Mamata had pushed it. But what we see in Bengal is total cacophony. There is no change in the precedence of post-poll violence unleashed by hooligans whose identities are yet to be established. Fifteen years of Trinamool Congress rule have made the police force in the state a partisan outfit. The culture of Trinamool Congress could be seen from the outbursts of the likes of Mahua Moitra and Derek O’Brien, the party’s members in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, respectively. They remind us of the embodiment of arrogance and scorn. Another character is Kalyan Banerjee, whose speeches, actions, and demeanor evoke a nauseating feeling. Though the elections are over and the BJP commenced its governance, nothing has changed except the CPI (M) mouthpiece getting government advertisements and the reopening of the party offices, which were shut down/ encroached upon by the Trinamool Congress.
Daily wage earners from Bengal working as tea masters and paratha makers in Kerala’s eateries have not returned for work after they went home to cast their votes. Many regulars in roadside eateries in Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram say that those Guest Workers (as they were addressed by their Kerala counterparts) were all CPI (M)’s card-holding members who had escaped from Mamata’s Bengal and are unlikely to return for work.
Abhishek Banerjee, Mamata’s nephew and heir apparent, and Kalyan Banerjee were assaulted by a mob when they went to console the family of Sanju Karmarkar, a TMC local chieftain who was killed allegedly by BJP workers. Kalyan Banerjee claimed that the mob threw stones at him and he suffered grievous injuries on his head[2]. But there were no marks of cuts or blood stains on his head when he appeared for a sit-in protest at Esplanade in Calcutta on Tuesday!
If these charges are genuine, the BJP had better watch out. The party should not forget what happened to the Janata Party in 1978. After the defeat of Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay Gandhi, there was an exodus of Congressmen to the new party, which resulted in the disintegration of the Janata Party much faster than it was formed. Now, we have more Janata outfits with all the alphabet from A to Z as suffixes. 25th June marks the 51st anniversary of the declaration of Internal Emergency by Indira Gandhi, whose chair was shaking because of the verdict delivered by the Allahabad High Court in an election petition filed by a political lightweight, Raj Narayan. The emergency was declared only to save Indira Gandhi from the Allahabad High Court verdict, which unseated her from the post of Prime Minister because she violated all the relevant rules of the Representation of the People’s Act.
Indira Gandhi was frightened of the giants in the Congress Party. She was frightened of Sidharth Sankar Ray, Chandrasekhar, Mohan Dharia, and even Tarakeshwari Sinha, the beautiful face in the Congress who was the “darling” of the senior leaders, whom she impressed with her intellectual prowess and articulation. That was the only reason behind the declaration of the Internal Emergency.
Something similar is happening in Bengal. What the state saw during the last 15 years of Mamata’s tenure was the coming to life of certain characters portrayed in “The City of Joy”, a novel authored by Dominique Lapierre with Calcutta as background. The present-day Kolkata has Trinamool Congress goons who survive by extorting money from laborers earning their livelihood out of the employment guarantee program.
The change of guard in Calcutta has its impact in Perumbavoor, a small town in Kerala, where roadside eatery shops and more than 1,000 plywood factories are being shut down. More than a lakh employees working in these establishments who went to Bengal for voting are not coming back, as they get a fresh breath of freedom and liberty from the Trinamool tyranny for the last 15 years.
It is a refreshing change in West Bengal, and the recent developments were on expected lines. Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee was behaving as if she had been possessed by some evil spirits, abusing and humiliating political rivals. Most of the TMC MLAs in the previous Assembly were afraid to open their mouth for fear of Didi. Great leaders inspire; Bad leaders terrorize.
Nothing surprising in the implosion of TMC as Mamata Banerjee travelled all the way to Delhi from Calcutta on Monday to catch up with the rebel MPs. It was too late.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
Reference:
[1] 20/28 Trinamool Lok Sabha MPs drop bomb, tell Speaker they want to join NDA – Jun 8, 2026, The Indian Express
[2] TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee claims BJP supporters attacked, injured him outside police station – May 31, 2026, The Hindu
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