Fortune, as Mamata Banerjee will no doubt realise when the defeat starts sinking in, is a fickle mistress.
She will blame everybody but herself, in ways only she can, but the larger implication of the Bengal 2026 verdict is unmistakable: She had frittered away the hope and faith the state had bestowed on her in election after election for a decade and a half.
The Trinamool Congress supreme leader cried “Loot! Loot! Loot!” at her Bhabanipur counting centre in the evening, pointing to the massive voter deletions and alleging “counting fraud”, as it became clear she would be relinquishing her 15-year grip on power.
“Do you think it is winning? It is an immoral victory, not moral victory…. Demonic party... they stole 100 seats, more than 100 seats they looted and cheated!” she said, slamming the poll panel as a “BJP commission”.
“Prime Minister, (Union) home minister... totally illegal. We will ask for countermandate (sic),” she cried. “SIR, the atrocities, counting fraud... Loot! Loot! Loot!”
On May 2, 2021, Mamata had lost her own contest in Nandigram but led her party from the front to a resounding victory against heavy odds. On Monday, 1,828 days later, she had failed to prevent a BJP sweep of the state while herself losing her backyard of Bhabanipur by a margin of 15,105 votes.
On both occasions, Mamata’s challenger was her protege-turned-bete noire Suvendu Adhikari, now the frontrunner to take her place at the helm of the saffron camp’s trophy state.
Monday marks 5,470 days from May 13, 2011, when Mamata ascended to power, riding her Singur-Nandigram anti-land-acquisition movement to unseat the 34-year-old Left behemoth in a David-and-Goliath battle.
Fifteen years on, Monday was her Goliath moment, when nearly 46 per cent of the post-SIR voters opted for poriborton (change) — something she had once promised but is largely deemed to have failed to deliver — while just 41 per cent stood by her.
“She will bend but not break. She will analyse and find fault with many. But she will also be very tired as darkness descends, every flicker of hope extinguished,” a Trinamool senior said.
Seeking anonymity, he admitted that Mamata’s doles and handouts had proved inadequate before surging anti-incumbency sentiments over the criminalisation of politics, corruption, economic and industrial stagnation, and joblessness.
“She tried her best to turn this into an anti-SIR referendum. But issues such as the RG Kar (rape-murder) and the multiple scams could not be wished away,” he said.
“Nor could we nullify the perception, among the majority of Hindus, of minority appeasement (by Trinamool). At least her third (and now final) term should have focused on job creation, industrialisation, economic uplift, and a check on corruption andcriminalisation.”
Many like this leader — if not the resident of 30B Harish Chatterjee Street herself — have already begun wondering whether this is not the end of the road for the 71-year-old politician’s long and chequered public life of five decades.
“She has authored many an astonishing comeback in the past, and another could have still been on the cards had she been about a decade younger. (Nephew and heir apparent) Abhishek Banerjee perhaps does not have it in him,” a city-based political scientist said.
“At this moment, she doesn’t even know for sure whether the party will stay afloat till the next big election. Imagine that for a party that still has 42 MPs (both Houses combined).”
Mamata will be stepping down after three terms as chief minister, having dominated Bengal’s political landscape since the summerof 2008.
“So this is the way our world ends, not with a bang but a whimper,” a Trinamool MP said, seeking solace inpoetry.
An outgoing minister observed with a wry smile that for the first time since June 1977 (when the Jyoti Basu-led Left wrested Bengal from the Congress), the state will have a government that does not have the excuse of “step-motherly treatment” from the Centre.
Questions will be raised for a while about the fairness of this election, with millions of voters denied participation by the dubious “logical discrepancies” parameter of Gyanesh Kumar’s Election Commission, the mass exclusions overseen by the Supreme Court.
But more likely that not, such murmurs will die down quickly. History tends to show little mercy to the vanquished.
Mamata, who had repeatedly promised an evening news conference to declare what she hoped would be a victory, made her first public appearance of the day in the form of a 91-second video message on her socials at 12.44pm.
It warned her counting agents against falling for the “game plan” of the BJP-Election Commission-centralforces.
“They are withholding the leads, pausing the counting.... In another 70-100 seats where we are winning, which they are not showing,” she said, urging her cadre with folded hands not to abandon their posts.
“Once the sun sets, we will win,” she asserted.
Mamata made another public appearance as the sun tilted further west, arriving at the Sakhawat Memorial Govt Girls’ High School — the counting centre for Bhabanipur — following allegations that one of her counting agents had been forced out. Suvendu, too, was present at the Lord Sinha Road venue.
She returned home sometime later as the crowds of media crew and cops in her Kalighat neighbourhood steadily thinned — for the first time in years — the fulcrum of power having shifted inthe state.
“I had begun believing Mamata would be chief minister emeritus. It’s somewhat sad, as her legacy could have been much more meaningful and lasting,” said a bitter political rival from the Congress, the party Mamata had broken away from 28 years ago to form Trinamool.
“A bit of poetic justice. It was the proverbial crocodile she had dug a canal for and invited to Bengal (as a BJP ally in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee era) that gobbled her up inthe end.”