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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-06-05 14:10:37

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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 numbers from Friday's meeting at Mamata Banerjee's Kalighat residence require no interpretation. Eight MLAs attended. Four of the TMC's 28 Lok Sabha MPs came. Eleven of the thirteen Rajya Sabha MPs stayed away. Whatever meeting was convened, it was not a show of strength. It was a public accounting of what remains. According to a TMC statement, it was a national working committee meeting to which not all MPs and MLAs were called. If so, what was MLA Madan Mitra doing there? He is not a member of the national Working Committee, unless inducted recently without public announcement.

Reports suggest that Mamata Banerjee personally telephoned legislators in the days before the meeting to secure their attendance. If accurate, the act itself was already a concession, an acknowledgment that the normal instruments of party discipline had ceased to function. The question was whether a personal appeal would succeed where institutional loyalty had failed. The attendance figures provide the answer.

An article in India Commentary on June 4 argued that the trajectory of three successive meetings, 71 MLAs, then 65, then 20, represented a graph of accelerating desertion. Friday's meeting has extended that graph to a point that makes the earlier numbers look like a period of relative health. Eight is not a faction. Eight is a rump. Among those present were Abhishek Banerjee, Firhad Hakim, Madan Mitra and a handful of others whose loyalty to the Banerjee family has always been personal rather than transactional. Their presence confirms nothing about the party. It confirms only that the innermost circle held.

The MP figures deserve separate attention. Legislative MLAs face elections, constituencies, and the daily arithmetic of local survival. Their absence can be attributed, however unconvincingly, to political calculation about which way their districts are moving. MPs are a different matter. A Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha member has a five-year term, a national platform, and no immediate electoral compulsion to hedge. When 24 of 28 Lok Sabha MPs and 11 of 13 Rajya Sabha MPs decline to attend a meeting convened by their party chief, it is not caution. It is a verdict.

The question the article raised on June 4 was whether Mamata's failure to act on the warning signs reflected miscalculation or arrogance. Friday has rendered that question partially moot. What is now visible is something beyond either: a leader who has lost the authority to compel even attendance, let alone loyalty. The reported phone calls were not the actions of a party chief managing a crisis. They were the actions of a leader who has already lost the institutional levers of her office and is operating on personal appeal alone.

Personal appeal, in politics, has a half-life. It works when the person retains the power to reward or punish. When that power is visibly gone, when 58 MLAs have already walked into the Assembly under a different banner and MPs calculate that the cost of association now exceeds the benefit, the appeal becomes not a show of strength but a measure of how far the authority has drained.

Reports also suggested discord within the rebel bloc itself over the terms of the offer made to Mamata. If she was waiting for cracks to appear in that group before making her move, Friday's meeting suggests she may be waiting in a room that is itself cracking. The loyalists who came are a political core, not a political base. A dharna can be organised with eight MLAs. A party cannot be rebuilt with them.

What remains is the question of whether the TMC as a political institution can survive this in any meaningful form, or whether what is being witnessed is the terminal phase of a party that became, over 28 years, so completely identified with one leader that it lost the ability to exist independently of her, and is now discovering, as she is, that the reverse is also true.

The lead image is AI-generated.