Kolkata: Fifteen years after she stormed Writers’ Buildings, scripting history as Bengal’s first woman chief minister, Mamata Banerjee on Sunday missed another brush with history — to be the country’s longest-serving woman chief minister.Banerjee changed Bengal politics in 2011, ending the Left’s 34-year term. Her Singur’s 2006 anti-land acquisition movement—which later helped reshape India’s land acquisition law—became a driving force. On Monday, the Trinamool chief not only lost in Bhowanipore but her party also lost Singur and Bengal.Neither Banerjee nor her party seniors anticipated a loss this big. “I do not accept this loss, I will be back,” she said. She is likely to be back in a role she is most comfortable in, that of an opposition leader. But now, after three terms in office, age is not on her side. The loss was perhaps inevitable. The 2019 Lok Sabha elections had changed her political challengers as neither the Left nor partly the Congress was her primary opponents any more. In 2019, it was the BJP, which built its record-high 38.15% vote share that translated into leads in 121 assembly seats in Bengal’s 294-seat House. She did resist the BJP poll juggernaut in 2019, but she was up against the unknown in 2026.SIR changed the pitch, removing a hefty chunk from the state’s voter roll, and chipping away at Banerjee’s primary vote blocks—the minority and women. The anti-incumbency-fuelled saffron wave, which she had stymied in Bengal since the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, swept her away.The SIR uncertainty presented an element of shadow-fighting for Banerjee and her party. Realising its potential danger, she opposed the timing of the exercise—and its tight two-month schedule— right from the beginning. Banerjee did have her moments of triumph. SIR missed its deadline, and in every locality, families were scarred by SIR and its ever-evolving demands. Her appearance in the Supreme Court as the “people’s petitioner” showed she had lost none of her fight-to-the-end spirit, even though the arena shifted from the streets of Kolkata to a Supreme Court chamber in New Delhi.Also Banerjee, whose governance is focused on social schemes, introduced Yuva Sathi, a monthly scheme for class 10 pass-outs, aged between 21 and 40 years who are looking for a job, and hiked allocation for Lakshmir Bhandar, a monthly scheme for women. These generated their share of enthusiasm. More than 81 lakh (over 10% Bengal’s voters) queued up to enrol for Yuva Sathi. But these “victories” counted for nothing after Banerjee failed to move her party out of SIR’s shadow and anti-incumbency. The other factors that held her in stead in 2021 were missing in 2026. I-PAC, the poll consultancy firm that had worked for Trinamool since 2019, suspended its operations. Elections were held under the watch of 2.4 lakh CAPF personnel. “Every vote for Trinamool is a vote for Mamata Banerjee; forget the candidate,” she had told Bengal’s voters in 2021, when nearly one in two listened to their Didi. This time, too, she had the same message, but they didn’t listen.With 40.8% vote share, Trinamool remains a formidable force in Bengal, trailing BJP by 5%. If anyone can reboot her party, it will be Banerjee.
