The turmoil within the Trinamool Congress (TMC) continues, as it scrambles to save face after about 60 MLAs chose not to attend a meeting called by Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay, legislative party leader in the West Bengal Assembly, at Mamata Banerjee's Kalighat residence.
Only 20 of the party's 80 MLAs showed up at the meeting, signalling high discontent within the party in the wake of its loss to the BJP in the 2026 Assembly elections.
The TMC, however, framed the low turnout as a consequence of the alleged attacks on its MPs Abhishek Banerjee and Kalyan Banerjee, which it has blamed on the ruling Suvendu Adhikari government.
"The meeting was pre-scheduled. However, in the aftermath of the attacks on our leaders, our MLAs are organising protest programmes at the ground level, following which severe police action has been unleashed on our workers," TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh told reporters at Kalighat.
"The absentee MLAs, who are stuck with managing the ground situation ... had informed the legislative party of the developments and requested if the meeting could be temporarily postponed," he added, calling it a "legitimate request", due to which the meeting was deferred until further notice.
The alleged attacks on Kalyan Banerjee by BJP workers near the Chanditala Police Station in the Hooghly district comes just a day after Abhishek Banerjee was attacked after he visited victims of post-poll violence at Sonarpur in the South 24 Parganas district.
This has led to a series of planned protests by the TMC from Monday onwards, in addition to the day-long symbolic dharna at Kolkata.
However, amid the blame game over the alleged attacks on the TMC leaders—and the upcoming party protests—speculations are rife that a deeper problem may be at the heart of the meeting being deferred.
This is because the meeting comes amid Ghosh publicly reprimanding the TMC MLAs for their alleged silence on the attack against Abhishek Banerjee.
"I noticed posts from national leaders of other parties protesting the attack on Abhishek. But I didn’t spot any posts from many of our party’s MPs, MLAs, councillors, officials, or former government officials," he wrote in an X post.
On the other side of this calculated silence is the sudden rise in TMC leaders criticising the party's own failures and its senior leadership.
Those who publicly expressed dissent include TMC spokespersons Riju Dutta and Dr Shantanu Sen, Rajya Sabha MP Sukhendu Shekhar Roy, councillors Arup Chakraborty and Sushanta Ghosh, former education minister and expelled leader Partha Chatterjee, former Barrackpore MLA Raj Chakraborty, and junior minister Manoj Tiwari.
However, the most recognisable voice of dissent against the party's post-poll actions is that of the TMC's Barasat MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, who even wrote a letter to Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla to file a complaint against Kalyan Banerjee over a number of allegations, including include verbal abuse inside the Parliament.
Her recent attendance of an administrative meeting chaired by CM Adhikari at Kalyani also indicates how the party's reported culture of silence might be breaking, leading to not just more dissenters, but also more leaders jumping ship to other parties, as the TMC attempts to weather a storm that may have no expiry date.
