Bengal deserved better after 34 years of Left misrule. It got a leader who was personally incorruptible but built a system around herself that was anything but. History will struggle to know what to do with her.
There is a woman in her seventies who sleeps four hours a night, walks barefoot as an act of political identity, paints in her spare moments, writes poetry nobody reads, and has won three consecutive assembly elections in a state that has humbled every opponent she has ever faced. She has survived assassination attempts, a broken leg from a political attack, the full weight of the central government deployed against her, and a BJP wave that swallowed states far better organised than Bengal. She is, by any serious measure, the most formidable regional politician in India today.
She has also presided over the systematic looting of Bengal’s schools, the institutionalisation of extortion as a form of local governance, the flight of over two thousand companies from a state that was once India’s industrial heart, and the slow, steady continuation of a sixty-year economic decline that she was elected, with a thunderous mandate, to reverse.
Both of these things are true. They live in the same person. And the tragedy of West Bengal, which is a genuine tragedy for a state and a people who deserved far better from the twenty-first century, is that you cannot understand it without holding both truths simultaneously, without letting either one cancel the other out.
This is an attempt to do that. To look at Mamata Banerjee steadily, without the reverence of her supporters or the contempt of her opponents, and to ask the question that Bengal’s future depends on answering honestly: what did she do with what she was given?
I
To understand what she inherited, you have to go back to 2011. By then, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had governed West Bengal for thirty-four uninterrupted years, longer than any democratically elected government in Indian history. What it left behind was not merely political exhaustion. It was structural devastation.
The Left had turned Bengal’s once-thriving industrial economy into a monument to ideological obstruction. Tata Motors, in 2008, abandoned its Nano plant at Singur after CPM’s land acquisition triggered protests that the party could not manage, protests that Mamata Banerjee herself led, shrewdly and effectively, to national attention. The message that Bengal sent to investors through that episode, that land, labour and political stability could not be guaranteed, had been sent repeatedly since the 1970s, and industry had been listening for decades. By 2011, Bengal’s share of India’s national GDP had fallen from 10.5% in 1960 to roughly 6%. Kolkata, which in the 1940s was ahead of Singapore, ahead of Hong Kong, the commercial capital of all of East Asia, was a city whose best and brightest had been leaving for a generation.
The Left had also bequeathed Bengal a culture of political violence so normalised that booth capturing, cadre intimidation and the murder of political opponents had become routine features of every election cycle. The state’s institutions, police, judiciary, university administration, local government, had been so thoroughly colonised by party loyalty that they had largely ceased to function as independent entities.
Into this broken inheritance walked Mamata Banerjee in May 2011, with 184 seats and a mandate so decisive it shook the foundations of Indian politics. The Left’s 34-year machine, which every political analyst had declared unbreakable, had been broken. By her. Alone. Through sheer, ferocious, personal will.
That achievement deserves its full weight before anything else is said. It was extraordinary. It may have been the single most significant act of democratic disruption in post-independence India. Bengal needed rescuing from the CPM. She rescued it. The question, the only question that matters now, is what she did next.
II
What she did next, in the first term, was genuinely promising. The welfare architecture she built, Kanyashree for girls’ education, Swasthya Sathi for health coverage, Sabuj Sathi bicycles for students, and later Lakshmir Bhandar, the direct monthly transfer to women, was not political theatre. These were real programmes, reaching real people, delivering real relief to the rural poor who had been promised much and received little for three and a half decades. Kanyashree won a United Nations award. Bengal’s multidimensional poverty rate fell from 24.7% in 2010 to 11.89% by 2023, meaning roughly 1.72 crore people moved out of poverty during her tenure.
These numbers are not fabricated. They are not propaganda. They represent the most basic function of government, reducing the sum of human suffering, being performed competently and at scale. The women of rural Bengal, who vote for Mamata Banerjee with a loyalty that confounds her opponents, are not voting out of ignorance or intimidation alone. They are voting because money arrives in their accounts every month, because their daughters stayed in school because of a bicycle, because a health card meant a hospital visit didn’t mean financial ruin. Welfare economics, done right, changes lives. She did it right.
The tragedy is not that the welfare failed. The tragedy is what was built alongside it, in the shadows of it, funded by the same political machine that delivered it, and what that shadow system did to every institution it touched.
III
The word for what happened to Bengal’s institutions under Mamata Banerjee is not corruption in the ordinary sense. Ordinary corruption is a transaction, a bribe paid, a favour returned, a file moved. What happened in Bengal was something more total. It was the replacement of institutional purpose with political loyalty as the operating principle of the state.
Consider education, the institution most consequential for a state’s long-term future, the one that determines whether the next generation can compete or cannot. In 2016, the West Bengal School Service Commission conducted recruitment examinations for thousands of teaching posts. The process was, according to findings by both the Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court of India, so comprehensively corrupted, with OMR answer sheets tampered with, scores manipulated on servers, fake appointment letters issued, money collected at fixed rates for guaranteed posts, that the courts ultimately nullified over 25,000 appointments entirely. The state’s Education Minister, Partha Chatterjee, was arrested. Crores in cash were recovered from the home of his associate. Thousands of qualified candidates who had genuinely cleared the examination lost positions they had earned. Thousands of unqualified ones, who had paid, taught Bengal’s children for years.
This was not a rogue official acting alone. This was a system. It required coordination across the commission, the ministry, the party, and the distribution network for the payments. It required enough institutional silence, at enough levels, for long enough, that it operated without interruption for years. That kind of silence is not accidental. It is organised. It is what happens when political loyalty replaces professional integrity as the price of a government job, and when the leader at the top, whatever her personal conduct, creates a culture in which the machine around her understands that its protection depends on its usefulness, not its honesty.
Then there is what Bengalis call cut money, the mandatory commission paid to TMC party workers for every government service, every construction contract, every rural job scheme payment. The term entered everyday Bengali conversation so naturally, so completely, that it stopped sounding like a description of crime. A man applying for a pucca house under a central scheme knows, without being told, that a percentage goes to the local TMC booth committee. A contractor bidding on a road repair knows the same. This is not the exception. This is the price of doing anything in Bengal that requires the state’s cooperation. And it flows upward, from booth to block to district to party, in a structure so well understood that its architecture has been mapped by journalists, academics and the courts. Mamata Banerjee did not invent this structure. But she inherited a state that desperately needed dismantling it, and she built it larger instead.
IV
Here is the word that sits at the centre of her story, the word that explains the gap between her personal conduct and the system she governs, between the woman who genuinely cannot be bought and the machine she built that genuinely cannot stop buying and selling everything within its reach.
That word is substitution.
Mamata Banerjee substituted herself for the institution. In every domain where Bengal needed functioning systems, an independent police force, an impartial civil service, a university administration that hired on merit, she installed loyalty to herself as the operating principle. Not loyalty to the party in the CPM sense, where ideology provided at least a theoretical framework. Loyalty to her. Personal, absolute, unreasoning loyalty to Didi.
The consequence is that her personal incorruptibility, and it is real, with nobody seriously accusing her of personal financial corruption, has provided moral cover for institutional corruption of staggering scale. She is clean. The system she built is not. And because she is clean, the system can always point to her when challenged. Look at Didi, her supporters say. Look at her simple life, her bare feet, her government salary. How can this be a corrupt government? They are pointing at the person and away from the institution, which is precisely the substitution that makes the whole architecture function.
The economic consequences of this substitution are written in data that cannot be argued with. Between 2019 and 2024, 2,227 companies, including 39 listed firms, moved their registered offices out of West Bengal. These are not BJP-aligned industrialists making a political statement. These are businesses making a rational calculation about where their capital is safe, where contracts are honoured, where the rule of law is sufficiently reliable to build on. They calculated that Bengal did not meet that bar. They left. Bengal’s share of India’s national GDP, which was 10.5% in 1960, stood at 5.6% in 2023-24, a sixty-year decline that has continued without interruption through Left misrule and TMC governance alike.
Kolkata was once ahead of Singapore. It is now a city from which Lufthansa suspended its Frankfurt service in 2012, leaving it without a single direct flight beyond Asia. That is not a statistic. That is a civilisational verdict on what seventy years of accumulated political failure has done to one of the great cities of the world.
V
The RG Kar Medical College case in August 2024 was not simply a crime. It was a moment of revelation, the instant when the curtain was pulled back far enough that even those who had chosen not to look could no longer avoid seeing.
A trainee doctor was raped and murdered inside a government hospital, in a room where she should have been safe. What followed, the reported disturbance of the crime scene, the protection apparently extended to those who might be implicated, the speed with which the narrative was managed rather than the justice pursued, the response to the doctors who protested, revealed the degree to which institutional integrity in Bengal had been subordinated, completely and perhaps irreversibly, to political calculation. The medical community across India went on strike. The middle class of Kolkata, the bhadralok, the educated, the people who had cheered her rise in 2011 and given her the cultural legitimacy that the rural vote alone could not provide, came out onto the streets against her. At midnight. In the rain. In numbers that Bengal had not seen in years.
That rupture has not healed. It will not heal before the 2026 election. It may be the most consequential political wound of her career, not because it will cost her the election, which it probably will not, but because it marks the moment when the story she had told about herself, the protector of the powerless, the fighter for the voiceless, the woman who stood between Bengal’s ordinary people and those who would harm them, became impossible to tell with a straight face to the people who most needed to believe it.
She will win in 2026. The welfare architecture is intact, the opposition is fragmented, and the rural women of Bengal have not been given a compelling reason to withdraw the trust they have placed in her monthly transfers. The election will return her to office. This is not in serious doubt.
What is in doubt, what Bengal’s history will eventually be forced to reckon with, is what her tenure will have meant. A state that was broken in 2011 received a leader of extraordinary courage and genuine welfare instinct, who lifted crores from poverty with real programmes and real money, and simultaneously hollowed out every institution that could have made that progress permanent. She built a floor under the poorest Bengalis and removed the ceiling from official corruption. She won elections brilliantly and governed badly. She read her voters perfectly and misread her responsibility to them entirely.
Bengal in 2026 is not the Bengal of 2011. It is better fed, better covered by welfare, somewhat less poor. It is also more institutionally degraded, more fiscally strained, more industrially diminished, more dependent on a single leader’s continued presence than any healthy democracy should ever be.
When Mamata Banerjee is gone, and she is in her seventies, and nothing is permanent, Bengal will discover what she left behind the welfare. Whether the institutions can be rebuilt. Whether the companies can be invited back. Whether the culture of cut money can be unlearned. Whether a state that has been substituting a person for a system for fifteen years can remember how to have a system at all.
That is the question her legacy will be judged on. Not how many elections she won. Not how many women received ₹500 a month. But whether Bengal, after her, is stronger or weaker than the broken, courageous, hopeful thing it was when she first walked into Writers’ Building in May 2011 and the Left, finally, left.
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