Mamata’s anti-BJP pitch fuels speculation of tactical Left–Trinamool realignment in Bengal
The Statesman | 11 May 2026
By declaring that “the enemy’s enemy is my friend; our first enemy is the BJP,” former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee may have done something almost unthinkable in Bengal’s bitter political history: signal a tactical reconciliation with the very Communist movement she spent decades dismantling.
For over three decades, Mamata Banerjee’s political identity was built on relentless opposition to the CPI(M)-led Left Front. She did not merely challenge the Left electorally; she waged a cultural and emotional rebellion against what she portrayed as an arrogant Marxist establishment that had exhausted Bengal’s economic vitality and democratic spirit. From the violent confrontations of the 1990s to Singur and Nandigram, Mamata’s rise was inseparable from anti-Left mobilization.
Yet politics has a cruel sense of irony. Today, after the BJP’s emphatic rise in Bengal and the symbolic ascent of Suvendu Adhikari as the state’s first BJP Chief Minister, Mamata appears to be confronting the unintended consequences of her own political success.
Her reported appeal — calling upon “all Opposition parties, including the Leftists and the ultra-Left,” to unite on a “joint platform” against the BJP — suggests a recognition that the destruction of the Left may have unintentionally weakened Bengal’s historic resistance to communal polarization and ideological majoritarianism. That realization marks one of the most significant political reversals in contemporary Bengal.
The BJP’s victory in Bengal did not emerge from nowhere, nor can it be explained solely through the language of Hindutva expansion. Bengal historically resisted overt communal mobilization even during the peak of the Ram Mandir movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when much of North India witnessed intense religious polarization.
Under the CPI(M)-led Left Front, Bengal’s political culture remained deeply shaped by secular class politics, trade unionism, literary cosmopolitanism and rural collectivism. The Left’s ideological ecosystem — however rigid or bureaucratic it became over time — left limited political space for aggressive religious majoritarianism.
Former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu once famously explained Bengal’s relative freedom from communal riots with characteristic brevity: “Karon amra chaayi ni” — “Because we did not want it.” Beneath that sparse remark lay a profound truth: communal violence rarely thrives without political permissiveness.
For decades, Bengal’s dominant political vocabulary was not Hindu versus Muslim, but landlord versus peasant, worker versus capital, and rural deprivation versus elite control. The Left institutionalized that vocabulary through land reforms, panchayat empowerment and cadre-based mobilization.
Political scientist Partha Chatterjee described this as Bengal’s “party-society” structure — a condition in which political organization became embedded in everyday social life. That structure often became authoritarian and intolerant, but it also acted as a firewall against communal fragmentation.
When Mamata Banerjee overthrew the Left in 2011, she inherited not merely power, but an entire social architecture built over three decades.
But in defeating the Left so comprehensively, the Trinamool Congress also shattered the institutional ecosystem that had historically prevented the Right from gaining emotional legitimacy in Bengal.
Mamata Banerjee’s political genius lay in converting anti-Left anger into a mass emotional uprising. She appropriated the language of resistance that once belonged to the Communists themselves. Nandigram and Singur gave her the moral force of a grassroots insurgent challenging an exhausted establishment.
Yet once the Left collapsed, its enormous voter base did not disappear. Much of it migrated — not necessarily toward Hindutva ideology, but toward the BJP as the strongest available vehicle of anti-Mamata sentiment.
This migration is one of the defining paradoxes of modern Bengal politics. Former CPI(M) workers, rural organizers and anti-Congress Left voters gradually became BJP booth managers, district mobilizers and ideological foot soldiers. In many districts of northern and western Bengal, the BJP effectively inherited the organizational skeleton once controlled by the Communists.
What shifted was less ideology than political resentment. The BJP thus rose not only because of Narendra Modi’s national appeal, but also because Bengal’s bipolar contest eliminated the Left as a meaningful alternative. In crushing the CPI(M), Mamata unintentionally cleared the field for the BJP to emerge as the sole repository of opposition anger.
That transformation fundamentally altered Bengal’s political grammar. Instead of class mobilization, identity polarization began occupying the center of electoral discourse. Instead of land reform and labour rights, debates increasingly revolved around religious symbolism, demographic anxieties and cultural nationalism.
The irony is striking: a leader who rose defending Bengal’s plural social fabric may have inadvertently weakened the very ideological ecosystem that protected it.
The decline of the CPI(M) was not solely Mamata’s doing. The Left had already entered a phase of ideological exhaustion long before 2011.
Historian Ranajit Guha once lamented that the Left had “ceased to behave like a movement and begun behaving like an establishment.” What began as revolutionary politics gradually hardened into bureaucratic managerialism.
Industrial stagnation, cadre arrogance and political violence alienated large sections of Bengal’s aspirational youth. The Singur and Nandigram crises proved devastating because they shattered the Left’s moral self-image. A government born from peasant struggles suddenly appeared willing to forcibly acquire fertile land in the name of industrialization. That contradiction destroyed the emotional contract between the Left and rural Bengal.
Yet despite its failures, the CPI(M)-led ecosystem continued to represent something larger in Bengal’s imagination: administrative sobriety, ideological seriousness and a secular political culture relatively resistant to communal rhetoric.
Economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen acknowledged that early Left governance in Bengal produced “significant advances in rural participation and social justice.”
Even critics conceded that Bengal under the Left preserved a political discourse fundamentally different from northern majoritarian politics. Once that structure collapsed entirely, the vacuum proved enormous.
Mamata Banerjee’s recent remarks therefore carry implications far beyond ordinary Opposition rhetoric. By reportedly saying “our first enemy is the BJP,” she appears to be reframing Bengal politics from a Trinamool-versus-Left battle into a broader ideological confrontation against the BJP. This resembles a tacit admission that fragmenting anti-BJP forces helped consolidate the saffron rise.
Her outreach to Leftists, ultra-Left student groups, NGOs and national Opposition parties suggests an attempt to reconstruct a secular-democratic coalition similar to the anti-Congress fronts Bengal once witnessed in earlier decades.
But this effort faces deep contradictions. For years, the Trinamool Congress politically cannibalized the Left. Violent cadre confrontations, ideological hostility and electoral annihilation created bitterness that cannot disappear overnight. Many Left supporters view Mamata not as a secular ally, but as the architect of Bengal’s democratic erosion who weakened institutional Opposition and centralized politics around personality cults.
At the same time, many Trinamool workers built their political identities precisely through anti-Communism. A sudden tactical convergence with the CPI(M) risks confusing the party’s own grassroots base.
Still, political compulsions often override historical enmity. The phrase “enemy’s enemy is my friend” is not ideological romance; it is strategic realism.
The larger question now is whether Bengal is witnessing merely a transfer of power or a deeper transformation of political culture.
The BJP’s rise represents more than electoral arithmetic. It reflects the entry of assertive nationalism into a state historically shaped by literary humanism, Marxist politics and regional-cultural self-consciousness.
Political theorist Ashis Nandy once argued that Bengal possesses a “moral-intellectual self-image” that instinctively resists crude ideological homogenization. Whether that tradition can survive an era increasingly shaped by identity polarization remains uncertain.
The BJP’s long-term success in Bengal will depend on whether it governs through administrative pragmatism or aggressive cultural majoritarianism.
If it delivers economic transformation while moderating ideological sharpness, it could consolidate a historic realignment. But if polarization deepens, the demand for a renewed secular-democratic alternative could revive.
That is the political space Mamata Banerjee now appears desperate to reclaim. Ironically, reclaiming it may require reopening dialogue with the very Left movement she once demolished.
In Bengal’s endlessly cyclical politics, yesterday’s existential enemy may once again become tomorrow’s reluctant ally.