The Watergate scandal cost a US President the White House. Which way will I-PACgate go?

On the night of June 17, 1972, a burglary was attempted at the Watergate hotel-apartment complex in Washington DC, the headquarters of the Democratic National Convention. What happened after that marked one of the most infamous cases of political espionage.

Nearly 54 years later, on the morning of January 8, 2026, Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee walked into first the residence of the head of her politico-electoral thinktank and later its office while a central probe agency, the Enforcement Directorate, was carrying out a raid.

She went on to accuse the central probe agency of “stealing” sensitive data related to her party’s poll campaign and strategy – much like Watergate – along with electronic devices.

Both the ED and Didi are in the process of hurling FIRs at each other as the battle moves to the court. But questions have been raging since Thursday since the chief minister walked out from both the addresses – the I-PAC office and its chief Pratik Jain’s residence – with files, the contents of which remain a mystery.

How could a CM do this and why did the ED allow her to walk out with “evidence” as it has alleged?

But then, this has always been Mamata’s style, her USP.

In November 2011, she had walked into Bhowanipore police station and allegedly forced the cops stationed to free two little-known Trinamool workers – Tapas Saha and Sambhu Sau. The duo was among a group of 300-odd people who had clashed with the cops from Bhowanipore police station, at walking distance from Mamata’s 30B Harish Chatterjee Street residence, and later ransacked the police station.

At that time – the evening of November 2011 – Mamata was the chief minister with the home (police) department portfolio under her.

On Thursday, too, while the ED sleuths accompanied by central forces were conducting a raid, the chief minister, along with top cops from the state police, Calcutta and Bidhannagar walked in and carried away files.

The act, praised by many of her admirers in private, smells of desperation, which surfaces whenever Bengal approaches an election.

Nearly a decade ago, in the run-up to the 2016 Assembly polls, the Narada tapes purportedly showed several Trinamool leaders, including MPs, ministers, the then Calcutta mayor and other MLAs accepting cash from a journalist posing as the representative of a fictitious company.

Stung by the revelations, Mamata had pleaded with the Bengal voters that she would have changed the nominees if she had known about it. In her long political career, this was one of the rare moments when she came close to blinking when under pressure.

While Mamata has not blinked on the ED episode, with months before Bengal goes to polls, Mamata and her Trinamool Congress seem to be on a sticky wicket thanks to the special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls.

Around 58 lakh voters have already been deleted by the Election Commission and the axe is hanging over at least 94 lakh others caught in “logical discrepancy.”

This figure of voters with “logical discrepancy” could significantly reduce by the time the exercise comes to an end, but neither the Trinamool nor any other party can say for sure how many will remain on the rolls.

Neither can any of them claim that the voters deleted thus far were all Trinamool voters.

But on paper, the numbers appear to be against Mamata and the Trinamool.

The difference in the number of actual votes between the Trinamool and the main opposition party in the state, the BJP, was 42,43,052 votes in the Lok Sabha elections in 2024. The BJP is already claiming victory with that vote difference being offset after the first round of SIR.

The 2021 Assembly polls was a landslide victory for the Trinamool, guided by I-PAC’s founder Prashant Kishor, who has since moved to active politics. Trinamool and Bengal’s politics has been increasingly controlled by I-PAC and that underscores the need for Mamata to be seen in public in her streetfighter avatar.

Five years ago when the Assembly polls were held last, the difference between the Trinamool and the BJP was 58,84,710 votes.

Of the 223 seats in Bengal’s 294-member Assembly, the Trinamool had bagged 176 seats with victory margins above 10,000 (some of them ran over a lakh). In 69 seats where the margin of victory was less than 10,000, the Trinamool had won 37.

But, the Trinamool is unable to rest easy even in those seats where it had won by comfortable margins five years ago.

The situation is best explained in the Assembly Constituency of Rajarhat-Gopalpur, bordering Calcutta. In 2021, the Trinamool nominee Aditi Munshi had won from the seat with a margin of 25,296 votes over the current state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya.

Three years later in the Lok Sabha polls, the Trinamool’s margin in the same Assembly segment was a mere 74 votes.

And this was before any SIR.

Till Mamata appeared out of the blue at the Loudon Street address of Jain’s residence around noon Thursday, there was radio silence from the Trinamool and I-PAC for hours since the ED raids began.

Mamata galvanised the Trinamool rank and file to hit the streets in unison at 4pm in every ward and block. The foot soldiers followed the orders to the T.

On Friday morning, in chilly Delhi, eight of Mamata’s MPs from both the Houses – Derek O’Brien, Satabdi Roy, Mahua Moitra, Bapi Haldar, Saket Gokhale, Pratima Mondal, Kirti Azad and Sharmila Sarkar – squatted outside the office of Union home minister Amit Shah.

Images of the MPs being physically dragged and lifted from the road were shared widely throughout the day.

In crisis, Mamata Banerjee has always turned to the streets. She has helmed the government in Bengal for nearly 15 years but she has not been able to – or not wanted to – shed the streetfighter image that she carefully built during her days in the Opposition.

Thursday and Friday were no different from that carefully cultivated image. She has accused Shah of stealing her party’s election documents via the central probe agency.

Very similar to what Richard Nixon faced – accusations that the burglars at Watergate were there to plant listening devices and steal sensitive files.

The waves of Watergate washed away Nixon’s re-election because in face of a massive cover-up, he had to resign two years into his second term. How far will the ripples of I-PACgate go? And who will be Nixon here?

Your guess is as good as ours.