West Bengal’s post-election drama is more consequential than the familiar story of Indian political defection. The developments unfolding around the Trinamool Congress after its defeat by the Bharatiya Janata Party in May’s Assembly elections point to a newer mechanism of power consolidation.
The immediate facts remain fluid. On Tuesday, rebel Trinamool leader Ritabrata Banerjee claimed to have the support of 65 of the 80 MLAs elected to the Assembly on the party’s ticket. The crisis has also moved to Parliament. Twenty of the 28 Trinamool MP s in the Lok Sabha have expressed their desire to merge with a little-known ally of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance from Tripura, a rebel MP said.
Already, three of the 10 TMC Rajya Sabha MPs resigned from the party and the Upper House.
India is familiar with individual defections. Turncoats have allowed the recipient party to benefit from the votes, the organisation and the skills they brought with them. But the mechanism of switching parties is surrounded by legal constraints. It used to cause misgivings among voters and is ultimately very time consuming.
However, what is now happening in Bengal points to something more ominous. The object is not only the politician. It is the party, or at least enough of it to ruin its political relevance.
Dozens of TMC MLAs and MPs have rebelled recently, flooding newsfeeds with stories about the collapse of the Trinamool Congress.
But is this really the end for TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee? @AnantGuptaAG unpacks in this week's Chronology Samajhiye. pic.twitter.com/2RXTheOVND
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The term that best captures this mechanism is party absorption. It is a political operation through which legislators, MPs, grassroots organisations, local brokers and symbolic legacies are drawn from the Opposition into the orbit of the ruling dispensation.
This is not merely a split. It is an attempt to make the defeated opposition useful to the establishment.
Though the legal position of such a strategy remains unsettled, the political meaning is already visible – the disintegration of the assembly opposition.
One aspect is particularly interesting. The rebels are not simply leaving the Trinamool. They are trying to carry its inheritance with them. At least in the Assembly, they still claim Trinamool’s legislative weight, organisational residue and even Mamata Banerjee’s symbolic authority.
The move by the Trinamool parliamentary faction to merge with the small Nationalist Citizens Party of India shows how the party’s personnel can be absorbed through another organisation.
This is not a clean ideological split. The rebels have not repudiated Mamata Banerjee’s political universe. Instead, they are trying to separate Mamata Banerjee and most of what she has come to symbolise from Abhishek Banerjee, her organisational heir.
In their narrative, the early Trinamool Congress was a movement of struggle, welfare and Bengali pride. The later Trinamool became dynastic, consultant-driven, coercive and corrupt.
This distinction is politically convenient. It allows rebels to claim moral recovery without fully accounting for their own participation in the regime they now denounce.
Today, exercising the provisions of the Constitution of India, more than two-thirds of the AAP MPs in the Rajya Sabha have merged with the BJP.
Seven MPs have signed the document, which was submitted to the Hon’ble Chairman of the Rajya Sabha.
I, along with two other MPs,…
— Raghav Chadha (@raghav_chadha) April 24, 2026
Political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya ’s 2023 account of Trinamool as “franchisee politics” helps explain why this is possible. Local leaders exercised territorial authority in exchange for loyalty to “Brand Mamata”. Once that brand lost office, many of the same actors could plausibly seek protection, relevance and opportunity elsewhere, because their local authority depended heavily on proximity to government, welfare delivery, contracts and administrative access.
Sociologist Angelo Panebianco in his book Political Parties: Organization and Power also helps clarify the situation. When Mamata Banerjee’s charisma is not routinised into durable institutions, defeat produces not programmatic debate but a scramble over inheritance.
Maharashtra was the earlier laboratory. Political scientist Ronojoy Sen has shown how the Shiv Sena and later the Nationalist Congress Party were weakened not by isolated defections alone, but by large blocs that claimed to be the authentic party and then aligned with the BJP-led ruling order.
Uddhav Thackeray, Sena (UBT) workers toiled hard to ensure victory of MPs; resign if you want to switch sides, Raut tells rebels
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Bengal extends that logic with a sharper regional consequence. Mamata Banerjee’s Bengali nationalism, once mobilised against Hindi-Hindu centralisation, is now at risk of being absorbed into a wider BJP-compatible Bengali parivar.
The BJ…
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