In one of the most remarkable political developments in recent decades, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), one of the major forces in the opposition INDIA bloc, collapsed in just about a month after it lost the West Bengal legislative election to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Twenty TMC parliamentarians have aligned with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), helping the Modi government gain numbers at a time when they are desperately seeking a two-thirds majority in the parliament. A two-thirds majority allows for constitutional amendments, which the BJP wants to carry out on several contentious issues like redrawing parliamentary constituency boundaries and simultaneous elections for parliament, state assemblies, and local self-governments.
While the NDA has inched closer to a two-thirds majority in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament, the TMC rebels’ support brings their strength to 313 in the lower house, the Lok Sabha. This is still short of the 362 seats it needs to amend the constitution.
Founded in 1998 by Mamata Banerjee, a firebrand streetfighter politician, the TMC governed West Bengal from 2011 to 2016 with a 63 percent majority and from 2016 to 2026 with a 73 percent majority in the state legislative assembly. It was India’s strongest regional party; no regional party has been able to wield the clout TMC did in West Bengal, or in opposition politics. Indeed, the TMC exercised immense influence on India’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Bangladesh.
However, in the recent state assembly elections, the TMC suffered a huge setback. It lost power to the BJP in West Bengal. Not only did it win just 27 percent of seats in the state assembly, but also several of its sitting ministers and legislators, including Banerjee, were defeated.
The party began to hemorrhage thereafter.
Fifty-eight of the TMC’s 80 legislators in West Bengal announced that they were forming a separate bloc, led by a leader the party had just expelled. The Assembly speaker acknowledged the breakaway faction as the TMC legislative party — a move that the TMC has challenged in court.
TMC parliamentarians began quitting thereafter. Twenty of its 29 members in the Lok Sabha exited.
To avoid anti-defection laws, the rebel MPs merged their faction with a hitherto unknown political party, the Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI), which had only 90 followers on its Facebook page before people suddenly got to know of its existence. It does not have a website.
This obscure party, thanks to support from the TMC rebels, is poised to emerge as the second-largest constituent in the NDA, overtaking well-known regional parties like the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Janata Dal (United), which have 16 and 12 parliamentarians, respectively.
Four TMC members of the upper house have resigned, opening up space for the BJP to win those seats in by-elections.
The hand of the BJP in engineering the split in the TMC’s parliamentary and legislative teams is clearly visible. Before breaking away from the TMC and merging with the NCPI, rebel TMC leaders discussed their strategy with senior BJP leaders, including Union Home Minister Amit Shah and West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari.
The BJP had gone on a similar defection drive to split the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which lost power in the Delhi assembly elections in 2025 after ruling for a decade. Seven AAP members of the Rajya Sabha — constituting a two-thirds majority of the party’s upper house strength — split and merged with the BJP in April this year.
Speculation is rife over a possible split in another opposition bloc party, the Shiv Sena-Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray.
Jairam Ramesh, a senior leader of the Congress, India’s main opposition party, lashed out at Shah, accusing him of masterminding the “illegal breakaway” of the TMC MPs to engineer a two-third majority for the NDA in the Lok Sabha. Describing Shah as “an absolute disgrace… (who) has taken Indian democracy to new lows in a shameless manner,” Ramesh alleged that “decency, decorum, and devotion to Constitutional values and principles remain vulnerable and threatened every day he continues in office.”
However, Bengal BJP minister Arjun Singh denied a BJP hand in the recent events. “Disgruntled TMC leaders broke away on their own. They met our leader to discuss joining the NDA,” he said.
The TMC rebels merged with the obscure NCPI instead of the BJP because two of them are Muslim leaders elected from Muslim-majority constituencies. Directly joining the BJP, which pursues aggressive Hindu majoritarian politics, would be politically highly risky for them, one of the rebel MPs told The Diplomat, requesting anonymity.
Senior lawyer Kapil Sibal, an independent parliamentarian critical of the BJP, said the TMC rebels’ merger with the NCPI reflected how Indian democracy had turned into a “theater of the absurd.” He demanded the disqualification of rebel TMC MPs. Another veteran lawyer and Congress leader, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, has described the “merger” of the rebel faction as illegal, as the constitution says the party outside the House must split first before its lawmakers could follow suit.
Rebel TMC legislator Sandipan Saha told The Diplomat that they were fed up with the way the party chief ran the organization. However, TMC leaders who remain close to Banerjee point to the BJP’s machinations. “Every party has internal dissatisfactions. Here, the BJP orchestrated the entire episode,” Madan Mitra, a legislator close to Banerjee, told The Diplomat. He alleged the use of police and central investigating agencies to pressure their parliamentarians and legislators to desert the party chief.
The legality of the split is likely to be decided in the courts.
How the weakening of the TMC will impact its equation with other parties of the INDIA bloc remains to be seen.
