October 03, 2026

The 'Akhand Congress' Mirage: Why Mamata and Pawar Will Not Walk Back

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-06-27 13:33:05

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Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack

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The phrase doing the rounds is "Akhand Congress", an undivided Congress, with every party that ever broke away from it returning to the fold. Nana Patole says Mamata Banerjee and Sharad Pawar are preparing to merge their parties with the Congress. KC Venugopal calls it a baseless rumour. Sanjay Raut wants Pawar to lead the way. Ashok Gehlot wants everyone to accept Rahul Gandhi as the supreme leader of the opposition. Supriya Sule says let it rain first, then we will decide on the umbrella.

Strip away the noise and one question remains. Is this rational for the leaders concerned? Once that question is asked honestly, the idea collapses under its own weight.

Start with Mamata. She did not simply leave the Congress in 1998. She built her entire political career on the claim that the Congress in Bengal was weak, compromised and unfit to fight the Left. The Trinamool's founding story is that the party she left could not win, and she could. A merger now would mean admitting that the project she has run for nearly three decades has failed. Politicians change their tactics all the time. They almost never abandon the story that justified their own existence.

Even after the drubbing TMC took in the 2026 Bengal elections, Mamata still has something the Bengal Congress does not: a recognisable face, a cadre network and a brand that still means something on the ground. Leaders negotiate from weakness. They do not, as a rule, shut down the company they built.

There is also a distinction that Patole and company keep blurring on purpose. Accepting Rahul Gandhi as the national face of the opposition is one thing. It is symbolic and it can be undone tomorrow. Accepting him as your organisational boss is another thing entirely. That means handing over control of candidates, party funds, appointments and strategy to people in Delhi who have never won a panchayat seat in Bengal. Mamata spent her career escaping exactly that arrangement. Nobody walks back into the room they fought their way out of.

Then there is Abhishek Banerjee, and this is the argument that should worry Congress strategists the most, because it has nothing to do with ego and everything to do with succession. Inside TMC, Abhishek is the heir apparent to a party that has run the Bengal government for fifteen years. Inside the Congress, he becomes one more ambitious forty something jostling for space among the Gandhis, Gogois and Gehlots of the world. No family hands over a business it controls outright for a junior partnership in someone else's firm. The Banerjees did not build TMC to dissolve it the moment it had a bad year.

Pawar is a different story, but not as different as Congress would like to believe. His party has already been split once, by his own nephew. His age makes succession an open question, and Supriya Sule may genuinely conclude that a larger national umbrella offers more security than a shrinking regional one. If anyone moves toward Congress, it is more likely to be NCP-SP than TMC. But even here, the obstacles are real. Maharashtra Congress has its own ambitious leaders who will not happily make room. Seat sharing between two parties chasing the same voter base is always messy. And Pawar has spent forty years building an identity separate from the Congress. None of that disappears because one election went badly.

There is also a legal wall that the merger talk conveniently ignores. Under the anti-defection law, a party merger is protected only if two-thirds of that party's legislators agree to it. This is the same provision that let Ajit Pawar walk away with the NCP's name and symbol. For TMC to merge into Congress, two-thirds of its MLAs and MPs would have to vote to dissolve the party that gave them their seats, their patronage and their relevance. There is little evidence at present that two-thirds of TMC legislators are prepared to dissolve the organisation that made their careers. If that ever changes, it will not look like a negotiated merger. It will look like a collapse, with legislators peeling off one by one rather than the party voting itself out of existence.

The ground reality in Bengal makes this even less likely. TMC's dominance since 2011 was built partly by absorbing Congress workers and voters who had given up on the Congress as a fighting force, including a large chunk of the Muslim vote that the party had failed to hold on to. Asking those workers to now rejoin the outfit they abandoned, at the exact moment TMC looks weak and the BJP is circling for defectors, would be read by the cadre as a surrender. That is the last signal TMC can afford to send right now.

All of this rests on one assumption, that TMC remains a coherent organisation despite the 2026 defeat. That is probably the biggest variable in the whole story. If TMC starts losing legislators in large numbers over the next six months, the question on the table stops being "why would Mamata merge with Congress" and becomes "can Mamata stop her party from falling apart". Those are not the same question, and they do not lead to the same answer. A negotiated merger remains unlikely even in that scenario, for every reason set out above. But a genuine organisational collapse, MLAs leaving in batches, district units going dormant, could force choices on Mamata that look irrational today only because the party still holds together. The NCP looked unbreakable too, right up to the point where it broke.

So why do Congress leaders keep floating this? Three reasons, and none of them require TMC or NCP-SP to actually agree to anything. One, Congress genuinely still sees itself as the natural umbrella for the opposition, and old habits of thought die hard. Two, merger talk is a pressure tactic, designed to push smaller allies toward accepting Congress leadership inside the INDIA bloc without conceding anything in return. Three, after a rival party's bad result, Congress gets a free news cycle of "we are the inevitable centre" coverage, at zero cost to itself. Notice that every one of these stories originates from a Congress leader. None of them comes from TMC or NCP-SP.

What is actually likely, if anything changes at all, is a tighter alliance dressed up in merger language. Congress stays the largest national party. Mamata and the Pawars keep their own outfits. Rahul Gandhi gets projected as the national face of the opposition while regional leaders run their states exactly as before. That arrangement costs nobody anything and changes nothing on the ground, which is precisely why it is the only version of this story that has any chance of being true.

India has had decades of fronts, alliances and coalitions. It has almost no examples of a regional satrap, while still politically relevant, voluntarily shutting down the party they built to rejoin the one they left. The Janata Dal fragments of the 1990s talked about reunification for years and stayed fragmented till today. Mamata Banerjee and Sharad Pawar will not be the exception. Treat this round of speculation for what it is: noise from a Congress trying to look relevant after someone else's defeat, not the beginning of an actual merger.