By 2005, Mamata Banerjee was considered almost a has-been.
Her 1984 Lok Sabha victory from Jadavpur against Marxist stalwart Somnath Chatterjee had been attributed almost entirely to the Indira Gandhi sympathy wave — though the ground reality was more layered. Somnath Chatterjee had appeared for Kolkata Police in a case involving the deaths of two children, arguing the deaths were accidental. Middle-class Bengali bhadralok never forgave him for that. Mamata won.
Then in 1989, a low-profile professor named Manini Bhattacharjee defeated her in the same seat by a far larger margin. She never returned to Jadavpur.
In 1991, a CPI-M goon named Lalu Alam fractured her skull during a Congress rally at Hazra in south Kolkata. She wore the injury like a medal. The Agni Kanya — Fire Maiden — narrative was being built, one bruise at a time. Senior Bengali journalists who would later deny coining the phrase “Agni Kanya” had by then given her exactly that halo.
In a country where politics has always been male-dominated and dynastic, she was a genuine outsider — a law and history graduate from a lower-middle-class family who carried a Santiniketan bag to political rallies. That image worked. In a Bengal exhausted by Left goondaism, it was exactly what people wanted to see.
Once dismissed as a “pagli” by Marxist party bosses, Mamata Banerjee rewrote Bengal’s political history — but has power made her the very monster she once fought?
Nothing is permanent like change. This is more so for politics. Time is also the best drug.
They called her ‘420’ — the Indian penal code for fraud. They called her ‘pagli’, Bengali for insane. CPI-M leaders, men who had governed West Bengal like a private estate for three decades, aimed these words at a woman in a cotton sari and bathroom slippers who kept showing up — at every murder scene, at every rally, at every funeral of their making.Politics
That woman was Mamata Banerjee. And by 2011, she had done what most of Bengal’s political establishment had declared impossible: she ousted the Left. After 34 years of Marxist rule.
“It is not me, it is the people of Bengal. That I am a woman is not the issue. Without my sisters I cannot do my job but not without my brothers too.” — Mamata Banerjee, after 2011 election victory.
In a country where politics has always been male-dominated and dynastic, she was a genuine outsider — a law and history graduate from a lower-middle-class family who carried a Santiniketan bag to political rallies.
That image worked. In a Bengal exhausted by Left goondaism, it was exactly what people wanted to see.
Singur, Nandigram, and the tide that turned
Coincidence, as much as character, shaped her career. Prakash Karat’s politically disastrous decision to withdraw Left support from the UPA government in 2008 handed Mamata enormous leverage. She allied with Congress, won 19 Lok Sabha seats in 2009, and her MPs became decisive for Manmohan Singh’s return as Prime Minister. Meanwhile, agrarian fury at forced land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram had already set Bengal alight — and Mamata, ever instinctive about when to stand on a street corner, had positioned herself squarely in the fire.
After floating Trinamool Congress with Mukul Roy — who was actually its first chairperson — she had even allied with the BJP briefly for the 1998 polls. The Lotus party gained a foothold in communist territory; TMC picked up seven seats.
These were not ideological pivots. They were tactical manoeuvres from a politician who understood that survival, not purity, was the currency of Indian politics.
The 2026 polls are, more than anything else, about West Bengal — and about Mamata Banerjee. But she enters the campaign in a position of peculiar vulnerability.
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has stated that West Bengal will have approximately 6.4 crore voters following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). That leaves roughly one crore undecided. More telling: in Bhowanipore, Mamata’s own constituency, 47,111 voters have been deleted from the final electoral rolls.
The significance is hard to miss. In 2021, she had suffered a stunning loss in Nandigram to her former lieutenant Suvendu Adhikari before winning a subsequent by-election in Bhowanipore to retain her seat and her chief ministership.
Her dilemma is a trap with no clean exit. She cannot publicly demand that polls be deferred until SIR is completed — because that risks inviting President’s Rule. The Election Commission, for its part, has made clear it will not engage with political attacks on the revision process, citing its constitutional obligation under Article 326.
The mirror she cannot look into
Fifteen years in office have a way of clarifying things. Mamata Banerjee was the people’s answer to Left goondaism and autocracy — to the machine politics of Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, and Biman Bose. She was seen, not incorrectly, as someone who understood the street because she had bled on it.
But her 15 years show she has not dismantled the communist machine — she has inherited and expanded it. The syndicate of lawlessness and corruption that once defined the Left’s Bengal is now, by most accounts, her own. The woman in bathroom slippers who chased murder after murder in Jyoti Basu’s Bengal has become the name those same streets whisper about today.
The phrase Agni Kanya — woman of fire, radiating transformation and inner strength — once felt earned. Whether it was ever truly deserved, and what remains of it now, will be debated long after 2026.
ends
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