India's fiercest female politician faces a fight for survival

FE Team | Published: May 06, 2026 22:37:34

For 15 years, Mamata Banerjee and her regional Trinamool Congress (TMC) party seemed to embody a political law of India's West Bengal state: they always found a way to survive, reports BBC.
On Monday, that ended.
The firebrand populist's defeat to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended her bid for a fourth consecutive term as chief minister - a feat that would have placed her alongside long-serving regional titans such as Jyoti Basu and Naveen Patnaik.
Banerjee's loss brings one of the most remarkable political careers in contemporary India to a moment of profound uncertainty - one that began with street protests and now culminates in the weakening of the political fortress she herself built.
Dimunitive and draped in a plain cotton sari and rubber sandals, Banerjee hardly looked like a politician who would topple one of the world's longest-running elected Communist governments.
Yet in 2011 she defeated the Communist Party of India (Marxist) after 34 uninterrupted years in power, overturning a political order that had come to define West Bengal itself. The state, once India's intellectual and commercial capital, had drifted through decades of industrial decline and political fatigue. At the time, The New York Times memorably called her "the blunt instrument knocking down their own Berlin Wall".