For 28 years, TMC has been Mamata Banerjee and Mamata Banerjee has been TMC in West Bengal; the two are almost synonymous with each other. And for voters, the political shorthand for Mamata Banerjee has been almost absurdly simple: two flowers on grass.Now, that shorthand has been taken away.The Election Commission on Friday allotted Mamata’s faction a new name – ‘Mamata All India Trinamool Congress’, with a football player as its symbol. The rival Arup Roy faction will contest as ‘Democratic Trinamool Congress’, with an ‘envelope’ as its symbol. The decision follows the commission’s September 17 order freezing the original All India Trinamool Congress name and its reserved ‘flowers and grass’ symbol for the upcoming bypolls.
Mamata Banerjee is now fighting to save her own party name and symbol.
But the EC’s interim arrangement is only the first chapter. The substantive question of who gets the original TMC name and symbol will have to be decided under Paragraph 15 of the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968.And here, the story might look familiar.The same movie was played out twice in Maharashtra in recent years, first with the Shiv Sena and then with the Nationalist Congress Party.
They do not know that I cannot leave TMC. It will always be with me until I leave this world. Absolutely dirty game, but we are also ready to fight it out. I want the BJP to go from India. We want solidarity in INDIA alliance.
Mamata Banerjee
What Shiv Sena and NCP cases tell us
When Shiv Sena split between Uddhav Thackeray and Eknath Shinde in 2022, the EC first froze the party’s ‘bow and arrow’ symbol and allotted separate interim identities to the two factions. In its February 2023 decision, the commission eventually recognised the Shinde faction as the Shiv Sena and allowed it to use the original name and symbol.The NCP followed a similar path. After Ajit Pawar’s rebellion in July 2023, the EC decided in February 2024 that the faction led by Sharad Pawar had a weaker numerical claim, while Ajit Pawar’s group had superior support in the organisational and legislative wings. It consequently recognised Ajit Pawar’s faction as the NCP and allowed it to use the party’s ‘clock’ symbol. The EC order specifically recorded that the Ajit Pawar group had “far superior numerical support” in the organisational and legislative wings.That is a crucial part of the precedent for the ongoing TMC dispute.The conclusion from the Maharashtra cases may be that the EC followed the majority of legislators. The legal position is more nuanced. Paragraph 15 allows the election commission to examine rival claims through the party’s organisational structure as well as its legislative strength.In its May 11, 2023 Constitution Bench judgment in Subhash Desai vs Principal Secretary, Governor of Maharashtra, the Supreme Court held that the EC need not determine a party’s identity solely through the numerical strength of its MLAs or MPs while adjudicating a dispute under Paragraph 15 of the Symbols Order. The court said the EC could consider the majority in the organisational wing, the party constitution and, where appropriate, “any other appropriate test”, underlining that a split among legislators is not necessarily the same as a split in the political party itself.
The timeline of TMC split.
The observation is particularly relevant to the TMC case, where the eventual contest could involve competing claims over the party’s organisational structure and not just a headcount of elected representatives. The Supreme Court, however, did not itself decide which faction should receive the Shiv Sena’s name and symbol, leaving the merits of that EC decision to separate proceedings.That distinction could matter considerably in the TMC case.The Shiv Sena and NCP rebels who ultimately secured the original party identities had substantial support among sitting legislators. The TMC’s internal arithmetic, however, has to be examined on its own terms.The 2026 assembly election setback changed the party’s internal arithmetic sharply. Its tally fell from 215 of 294 seats in 2021 to 80, and within weeks, 58 MLAs backed expelled leader Ritabrata Banerjee as their legislature party leader. He was subsequently recognised as leader of the opposition, while the rebel camp rejected Mamata’s nominee, Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay.The revolt then spread to Parliament, with 20 Lok Sabha MPs led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar joining the NCPI and backing the BJP-led NDA. The TMC challenged their move before the Lok Sabha speaker and sought their disqualification. What began as a post-election leadership challenge had thus expanded into a contest over control of the party’s legislative and parliamentary wings.Mamata Banerjee, however, remains the founder and central political figure of the organisation, and her camp’s claim is not based only on her position as party leader but also on its organisational and electoral support.
The ‘new’ Mamata party
The names allotted on Friday were revealing because neither faction chose to abandon the Trinamool identity. Mamata’s camp was given ‘Mamata All India Trinamool Congress’, while the rival Arup Roy camp became ‘Democratic Trinamool Congress’. Both were, in different ways, laying claim to continuity with the party Mamata Banerjee founded on January 1, 1998.The distinction lies in the source of legitimacy each side is emphasising. The rebels’ use of ‘Democratic’ fits their argument that the TMC’s organisational functioning should be more representative and less centred around one leader. Mamata’s faction, meanwhile, has effectively put the founder’s name where the old party identity used to be, making ‘Mamata’ part of its temporary electoral brand. That is particularly striking for a party whose political identity has been inseparable from its founder for almost three decades.
They had said beforehand, ‘naam bhi rakhne doonga, nishaan bhi nahi rakhne doonga’ (Neither let you keep the name nor the symbol). Who are these people? They are in power today; they might not be in power tomorrow. They should understand their limitations.
Mamata Banerjee
The football-player symbol allotted to Mamata’s faction also carries its own political resonance in Bengal. Football has long had a deep cultural presence in the state, but there is also a direct connection to the TMC’s campaign vocabulary: ‘Khela Hobe’, the slogan that became a defining part of Mamata’s 2021 assembly campaign against the BJP.The symbol does not automatically recreate that campaign, but it gives the Mamata faction a ready-made visual association at a time when it has lost the party symbol voters have known for nearly three decades.The test, however, has now changed in a rather dramatic way for the Mamata faction.
Nandigram changes the bypoll test
Mamata faction’s candidate, Sanchita Pradhan Dey, withdrew her nomination from the Nandigram contest altogether, a day before the deadline. Her withdrawal came minutes after she met West Bengal chief minister and BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari, although the circumstances surrounding the meeting and her decision remain a matter of political speculation.Mamata Banerjee later announced in a press conference that her party will now back the Congress candidate in Nandigram, and mentioned that the decision was taken “for the greater interest of the nation” and to strengthen the INDIA bloc.“Rahul Gandhi rang me up yesterday, Arvind Kejriwal also expressed solidarity; we will all fight together against BJP. We will support Congress in the Nandigram bypoll to strengthen the INDIA bloc,” Mamata said. The Congress candidate, however, was also arrested by the cops late in the evening in a land-grab case.That makes the October 6 bypolls a very different test from the one that appeared possible 24 hours earlier. The Mamata faction will now not be testing its new ‘football-player’ identity in Nandigram, but instead, ask its supporters to transfer their support to a Congress candidate, even as the rival TMC faction contests the seat under its own new identity.The political significance is difficult to miss. At precisely the moment when the EC has stripped Mamata’s faction of the old TMC name and symbol and given it a new identity, the faction is now out of a direct fight in Nandigram, a constituency that carries an unusually strong personal history for both Mamata and Suvendu Adhikari.
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Nandigram was where Mamata lost to Adhikari in the 2021 assembly election, after making the constituency the centrepiece of her campaign. Adhikari, who had moved from the TMC to the BJP before that election, defeated her by a narrow margin in a contest that became one of the defining episodes of Bengal politics. He subsequently retained Nandigram while also winning Bhowanipore, which he vacated to retain Nandigram, necessitating the October 6 bypoll.The EC may eventually decide who owns the TMC name and symbol, but the October 6 bypolls will offer the first test of how much of the old Trinamool identity survives without ‘flowers and grass’. In Rejinagar, the football player and envelope will face each other directly; in Nandigram, Mamata’s decision to back Congress will test whether her political support can travel even when her own new party name and symbol are not on the ballot.
