TMC’s exposure is a lesson for other parties

Rarely in the political history of India has any party unravelled so quickly after an election defeat as the Trinamool Congress (TMC) seems to have done in the past two weeks. Is the rebellion within TMC a familiar pattern or a unique phenomenon?

The short answer is that it is both.
The pattern is familiar, as the last few years have seen frequent fractures in Indian politics. Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) split in 2022-23; then earlier this year, seven Rajya Sabha MPs from AAP joined the BJP, and now six Shiv Sena (UBT) members are likely to merge with the Eknath Shinde-led Sena.

However, what has unfolded in West Bengal in the past two weeks is qualitatively different. Public outcry has led to some regional parties collapsing so dramatically and breakaway factions taking away a significant share of MLAs in both the Assembly and the Lok Sabha.

The common thread connecting Shiv Sena, NCP, AAP and now TMC lies in the intersection of two forces. The first challenge is that of intergenerational succession. Most regional parties have evolved into family-centric political enterprises.

As long as the founders remain electorally influential, they rarely face questions. Problems arise when the next generation takes command.

Previously, political families or dissidents fought succession battles, but they often lacked the resources to mount a serious challenge. Now, ambitious lieutenants may accept the authority of a founder, but they are most likely to disband their troops when leadership is passed to a family heir.

And with the political dominance of the BJP since 2014, such dissidents have an alternative home.

Allying with the ruling party may ensure their political survival, protection from scrutiny, or a faster path to political advancement. BJP supporters will say that the party did not create these circumstances of rebellion.

Yet, it has become remarkably effective at exploiting them and reshaping the opposition it faces.
Yet, the story of Bengal goes beyond just succession and the BJP’s strategy. After all, other regional parties have experienced leadership changes and electoral defeats without such rapid disintegration.

There has been no such abandonment so far from the Samajwadi Party, which has been out of government since 2017, or the RJD, which has largely been out of government since 2005, except for a few years in alliance with Nitish Kumar.

The YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) suffered one of its most dramatic recent defeats in Andhra Pradesh. It also remained intact as an organisation. Even after years of factionalism following Jayalalithaa’s death, the AIADMK retained a significant core organisation after the 2026 Tamil Nadu elections.

Many MLAs who supported Vijay during the floor test returned to former CM E Palaniswami. In neighbouring Odisha, the BJD lost to the BJP after ruling for almost a quarter of a century. Despite its high centralisation around Naveen Patnaik, the party retained a distinct organisational identity and administrative reputation that survived electoral defeat.

Why has TMC proved to be weaker? The answer lies in the nature of party building itself. Unlike other parties, where ideology or long-standing social identity creates loyalty beyond office, the TMC, in its 15 years in office, has relied on something different:

fusion between the party and the state. As political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharya has noted, under the Left Front the party-society model transformed into a “franchise model” in which the TMC leadership promoted local strongmen in return for complete loyalty and voting for the party.

These local owners exercised full autonomy to run their areas as individual fiefs, thereby erasing the distinction between party and state.

Such systems are likely to yield formidable electoral machines, but they also tend to produce extremely fragile organisations. Once the ecosystem of political influence, physical control over territory, and access to state resources collapsed, the incentive to remain loyal also collapsed.

Moreover, in the winner-take-all political culture of West Bengal, regime change often leads to social, economic and even violent consequences for local actors.

TMC’s troubles provide lessons beyond Bengal as well. For parties, especially family-centric ones, closing leadership pipelines, discouraging internal competition, and stifling organisational renewal can quickly turn electoral defeat into organisational collapse.

For the Congress, which has grappled with similar problems for decades, the message is equally uncomfortable: leadership succession without organisational renewal can maintain control but rarely creates flexibility.

And for the BJP, its successes hide a caveat of stoking division within the opposition. Many of the weaknesses he exploits – centralisation and excessive reliance on individual leaders – are hardly unique to him. As long as the BJP remains electorally dominant, these issues will continue to be visible. The TMC episode shows how flexibility can slip away as power begins to decline.