Mamata Banerjee has moved to reassert her grip over the fractured Trinamool Congress, carrying out a sweeping organisational overhaul that stops short of punishing her nephew Abhishek Banerjee directly, but leaves little doubt about who is back in charge. The reshuffle, announced on Friday, reappoints Abhishek Banerjee as the party’s national general secretary. But in the same breath, it places two of Mamata’s most trusted allies, Rajya Sabha MPs Derek O’Brien and Dola Sen, alongside him as joint secretaries, officially to “assist” him in running the organisation. Few within the party were under any illusion about what the move truly meant.
Both O’Brien and Dola Sen enjoy direct access to Mamata Banerjee and are regarded as among her closest confidants. Their appointment effectively ends the era of unchecked authority that Abhishek had exercised within Trinamool, introducing, for the first time in years, a system of checks and balances at the top of the party. The message, as political observers noted, was clear: Abhishek is no longer beyond questioning.
The reshuffle also saw Abhishek’s loyalist Trinankur Bhattacharya removed as president of the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad, the party’s student wing, and replaced by Priyanka Adhikari. Senior leader Chandrima Bhattacharya was elevated to state president, signalling a broader generational reset within the organisation. Subrata Bakshi continues as vice-president in the National Working Committee, while new faces were brought into several party wings.
The restructuring comes after weeks of open rebellion within Trinamool, triggered largely by resentment towards Abhishek rather than Mamata Banerjee herself. Following the party’s crushing defeat in the assembly elections, long-suppressed grievances poured out. Senior leaders pointed to Abhishek’s reliance on political consultancy firm I-PAC, which he had brought in to manage the campaign, as a key reason for the loss, alleging it had sidelined grassroots workers and allowed a parallel party structure to develop that gradually eroded Mamata’s own authority.
As per the media reports, TMC MLA Krishnendu Choudhury alleged that Abhishek had destroyed the party “bit by bit”, while MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar suggested that I-PAC had undermined the very workers on whom Trinamool’s electoral machine had always depended. From candidate selection to booth management, Abhishek’s imprint was visible across the campaign, making the defeat, in many ways, as much a verdict on what came to be called the ‘Abhishek model’ as it was on Mamata’s years in government.
At the heart of the rebellion was a forged signatures row, in which MLA Ritabrata Banerjee alleged that the signatures of several TMC legislators had been fabricated in a letter Abhishek sent to the Bengal Assembly Speaker proposing Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay as Leader of the Opposition. The allegation galvanised 58 MLAs into defying the party leadership and seizing control of its legislative wing. Abhishek’s role in that episode is now the subject of a CID probe.
The anger was not confined to corridors and committee rooms. Last week, Abhishek was attacked with eggs and stones by locals in Sonarpur while visiting the family of a TMC worker killed in post-poll violence and had to be hospitalised. He blamed the BJP for orchestrating the attack. The BJP, in turn, pointed to what it described as extortion networks run under TMC’s watch, roadside rackets on state highways that had come to be known colloquially as the ‘Bhaipo tax’, a label that stuck and that the party made a central plank of its campaign.
The contrast between aunt and nephew has long been a source of tension within Trinamool. Mamata built her political career the hard way, through decades of street-level struggle, hunger strikes and protests that eventually ended 34 years of Left rule in Bengal. Abhishek, by contrast, was elevated by his aunt without comparable roots in the party or among its workers. That sense of entitlement, as many veterans saw it, never fully sat well with those who had given years to building Trinamool from the ground up.
Loyalist MLA Kunal Ghosh hit back at the rebels on Friday, saying they had won their seats on Mamata’s name alone. “It has barely been a month. Even the election ink on their fingers has not faded, and BJP has not even allocated portfolios to its ministers, and they are doing this,” he said. “Their actions speak volumes about their character. But the party workers are still with us.”
Mamata, for her part, appears to have chosen a middle path, neither shielding Abhishek entirely nor cutting him loose. Whether that balance holds will depend on how much authority he is willing to cede, and how much the rebellion within Trinamool still has left to run.
