After fifteen years and three straight terms, West Bengal rejected Mamata Banerjee and gave way to the BJP under Suvendhu Adhikari. The BJP won 207 of 294 seats in the 2026 Assembly election; the Trinamool was left with around 80. That became the headline of the BJP wave sweeping West Bengal but not the real story because a wave explains a defeat, not what comes after it. Barely a month into the new government, theTrinamoolis not regrouping to fight back. It is coming apart. A four-term MP has resigned. Scores of councillors have walked. Fewer than half its MLAs turned up to its own protest. And not one of the defectors blames Hindutva — they blame their own high command.

To see why, look at the man now sitting inMamata Banerjee'schair. Suvendu Adhikari is not an RSS man and did not come from the saffron camp. He was Mamata Banerjee’s field commander of the 2007 Nandigram land agitation, the uprising that built the Trinamool and carried Mamata to power in 2011. For years he was her right hand. Today he is taking her party apart brick by brick, with the one weapon he used to build it: the ground beneath it.

Do the simple math and the idea of wave sinks. In 2021 the BJP won 77 seats to the TMC's 213 and then leaked support. Twelve of those 77 MLAs defected back to theTrinamool, including Adhikari's Haldia lieutenant Tapasi Mondal. In 2024 the BJP fell to 12 Lok Sabha seats from 18, while the TMC climbed to 29 from 22. No tide. Yet its only fresh South Bengal wins were Kanthi, taken by Suvendu's brother Soumendu, and Tamluk, both Adhikari turf, even as it lost ground across Jangalmahal. When the "wave" ran backwards, only Adhikari's ground delivered. That is not a wave. It is a machine.

To grasp why TMC leaders are leaving today, understand what Suvendu Adhikari is. He is not an ideologue. He is a ground-level organiser who goes from booth to booth, always agitating just like Mamata did in her initial years. His politics was forged in the 2007 Nandigram anti-land-acquisition movement alongside Mamata Banerjee, where he marshalled villagers against the land grab and turned their anger into a lasting base for the then-rising Trinamool. And then he shifted to the west into the Jangalmahal – Bankura, Purulia, Paschim Medinipur – building the local leaders and cadres who powered first the TMC's rise and then the BJP's.

Then there is blood. The Adhikaris run Purba Medinipur like a private estate: patriarch Sisir, a former MLA and MP; brother Dibyendu, Tamluk's MP until 2024; brother Soumendu, who took Kanthi for the BJP that year.

Mamata Banerjee said as much, and bitterly, when the family parted its ways from the TMC, accusing them of behaving like "zamindars" who controlled the region in a way that even she could not hold meetings there. She also likened them to "Mir Jafar," the traitor of Plassey. The insult contained a frustration and a possible admission that the stronghold in Purba Medinipur had never really been the party's. It was Suvendu's.

The clearest demonstration of that ownership came in December 2020, when Adhikari quit the Trinamool, citing nepotism, with his fire aimed squarely at Mamata's nephew Abhishek Banerjee, and joined the BJP with nine MLAs and a sitting MP. A region's political class moved as a single bloc behind one man. That image is the template for everything now unfolding.

Read this way, 2026 was not ideology defeating ideology. It was one mobilisation machine beating another on ground the challenger knew better than the ruling party did. Bhabanipur was the symbolic kill — Adhikari unseated CM Mamata Banerjee in her own bastion. The structural story was in Purba Medinipur and the Jangalmahal, where the relationships Adhikari had spent two decades building were simply re-pointed. He did not import a wave into those districts. He switched on a network.

The TMC is not being argued out of power; it is walking out on itself. The tell is in the grievances: the people leaving blame the party's own machinery, never the BJP, and never ideology.

Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar: Four-term Barasat MP and president of the All India Trinamool Mahila Congress quit all her organisational posts, blaming the consultancy I-PAC and Abhishek Banerjee's centralised functioning for cutting the party off from its grassroots. She said I-PAC treated veteran workers as servants and filed a misogyny complaint against Kalyan Banerjee.

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