New Delhi: The defeat of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is poised for a historic first victory, is likely to reverberate far beyond the state’s borders. While the immediate beneficiary is the BJP, the result could also ease tension within India’s opposition ranks — one that has centered around Mamata’s uneasy relationship with the Congress.
For several years, Mamata had emerged as one of the strongest voices within the Opposition’s INDIA bloc. Her party, the All India Trinamool Congress, had argued that its success in repeatedly defeating the BJP in Bengal offered a template for opposition unity elsewhere.
The first clear signal of her national aspirations came in December 2023, when she proposed the name of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge as the alliance’s prime ministerial face — a suggestion backed by Arvind Kejriwal. The move was widely interpreted as an attempt to pre-empt the elevation of Rahul Gandhi as the default leader of the opposition coalition.
Even after the Congress improved its performance in the 2024 general election and Rahul Gandhi assumed the role of leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, speculation about Mamata’s claim to national leadership persisted. Her standing was bolstered by a series of electoral successes in Bengal, including a sweep of six Assembly by-elections later that year.
Leaders within her party were explicit in pressing that case. In November 2024, Trinamool Congress parliamentarian Kalyan Banerjee publicly questioned the Congress’s leadership credentials. “For the past three or four years, what have they done? In the INDIA alliance, who is the leader? Nobody has been chosen as a leader, as a face of the Opposition. Now it has to be done. The Congress has failed, that is established,” he said, pointing to the party’s setbacks in states like Haryana and Maharashtra.
He went further, arguing that Mamata’s record made her a stronger candidate for national leadership. “People have reposed confidence in Mamata Banerjee… People of the country love her… She has all sorts of qualities, better experience and qualities than whoever is the leader of the Opposition,” he said.
Mamata Banerjee herself signaled a willingness to take on that role. “If given the opportunity, I would ensure its smooth functioning,” she said in December 2024, referring to the INDIA bloc, even as she noted that she had played a key role in bringing the alliance together.
Her potential leadership also found support among other regional figures. Lalu Prasad Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal said she should be allowed to lead the bloc, regardless of the Congress’s position, while leaders of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray faction) suggested that her leadership could strengthen the opposition’s challenge to the BJP.
Central to Mamata’s claim was her assertion that she possessed a “winning formula” against the BJP. After her decisive victory in the 2021 Bengal Assembly election, she repeatedly argued that while the Congress struggled in direct contests with the BJP, her party had successfully resisted what she described as the full force of its campaign machinery.
In the lead-up to the current election, she again hinted at broader ambitions. Speaking at a rally in Kolkata, she said she intended to “take over Delhi” after securing victory in Bengal by uniting opposition parties, adding that her goal was not power for its own sake but the “complete dismantling” of the BJP at the national level.
The emerging results suggest a starkly different outcome. As of Monday afternoon, the Trinamool Congress appeared unlikely to cross 100 seats in the 294-member Assembly.
For the Congress, the implications are significant. Mamata’s diminished standing could reduce internal competition within the opposition alliance and reassert the Congress’s centrality in national politics.
