- Wednesday, March 12, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
FOR a leader of her stature, it was not easy for Mamata Banerjee to take this lying down. And even if she wanted to turn a blind eye to the massive cash scam which has been unearthed in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal which her party Trinamool Congress (TMC) rules, the pressure from within the ranks would not have allowed her so.
The result was seen on Thursday (28) when Partha Chatterjee, one of the state’s top ministers and a frontline member of the TMC, was not only removed from all the key posts but even suspended from the party. Abhishek Banerjee, the nephew of the chief minister who is considered No.2 in the party, said the TMC would give the membership of Chatterjee a reconsideration after he proved himself to be clean.
These steps were taken after piles of cash were seized from the residence of a woman aide of Chatterjee. Video clips and pictures of millions of raw cash being discovered by officials of a national probe agency, which reportedly are linked to a state teacher recruitment scam, have caused a deep resentment among the common people and opposition forces in the state which has historically not been known for monetary corruption.
Mamata initially did not pick up the phone after Chatterjee tried to reach out to her multiple times after he was arrested but neither was he sacked immediately. The Bengal chief minister also tried to counter it saying it could be a trap, something she has done in the past as well, presumably to win the public trust. But eventually, she had to drop Chatterjee, one of her most trusted generals who had been with her through her days of rise, like a hot potato.
Why did Mamata sack and suspend Chatterjee?
First of all, Banerjee is one of India’s major opposition faces at the moment. Even though she leads a regional party that doesn’t have much leverage outside Bengal, yet a steady decline of the Indian National Congress, the only other national party in India apart from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, has emboldened the regional parties’ ambition to become a national force and Banerjee’s outfit is no exception.
The Chatterjee episode happened at a time when the TMC is deeply focusing on the 2024 general elections with a hope of toppling prime minister Narendra Modi. But to fight Modi who has so far gifted the countrymen a blemish-free administration, those trying to beat him must also come up with something similar. Given the fact that Mamata herself is known for an image of honesty and simple living, the pictures of mountains of cash were completely out of sync and damaging. Hence, she had to get rid of Chatterjee at the earliest.
Those who closely follow Bengal politics often claim that the state’s ruling party is actually a unity of two opposing camps. One is composed of the loyalists of Banerjee, her old warhorses who are there with her since the party was formed in the late 1990s and during the time of the farmer agitation in Singur and Nandigram. The other is the camp which is loyal to Abhishek, the young Turk, and it has little in agreement with the veterans. The Abhishek camp has reportedly been putting pressure on the chief minister to drop some of the old guards and reorganise the cabinet. Even if Mamata and her old guards had been resisting this pressure, the Chatterjee episode made it impossible for them to overlook it any more.
A new cabinet will soon be formed in Bengal which suggests that Mamata has in a way made peace with the voices that had been putting pressure on her.
Actor Mithun Chakraborty, who was once close to the TMC but shifted to the BJP ahead of the 2021 elections in the state, claimed this week that more than three dozen TMC state legislators are in touch with the saffron camp and that a situation like in Maharashtra would not be impossible in Bengal. In the western state, the ruling Shiv Sena recently saw a major split within its ranks that toppled the coalition government led by former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray while rebel Sena leader Eknath Shinde became the new chief minister with the help of the BJP.
To see that happening in Bengal would be disastrous for an ambitious party such as the TMC and its equally ambitious leadership which loves to see itself as an alternative prime ministerial face challenging Modi. Before the Chatterjee episode became big enough to cause more damage in the party, Mamata got rid of the man.
Finally, there have been charges of monetary corruption against the TMC in the past as well and video footage of a number of TMC leaders accepting money on camera did left the top leadership worried. But given the fact that she has been one of India’s major mass leaders still, Banerjee succeeded in overcoming those challenges to single-handedly win the 2016 assembly elections for her party. For someone who always stresses on the slogan of ‘Maa, Maati, Manush‘ (mother, soil and humans) to show how much her party is rooted to a humble base, it is extremely challenging for Mamata to prove time and again before her constituency that other leaders of her party are as selfless.
Therefore, she had to take a stern step to sack Chatterjee in an indirect message to other leaders that going the tainted former minister’s way is akin to suicide.
