Mamata Banerjee

Mamata Banerjee (born January 5, 1955, Calcutta [now Kolkata], West Bengal, India) is an Indian politician, legislator, and bureaucrat who served as the first female chief minister of West Bengal state, India (2011– ). She founded the Trinamool Congress political party, which is active at both the state and central levels. Popularly known as Didi (“Elder Sister”), Banerjee is known for her firebrand personality, austere living, and trademark dress of simple cotton sari and slippers. Her brand of politics and governance is synonymous with the slogan “Maa, Maati, Manush” (“Mother, Land, People”).

Early life and political debut

Banerjee grew up in a lower-middle-class part of south Calcutta (now Kolkata), and her father died when she was young. Still, she was able to go to college, eventually earning several degrees, including a bachelor’s in law and a master’s in arts from the University of Calcutta. She became involved with politics while still in school, joining the Congress (I) Party (a breakaway faction formed by Indira Gandhi in 1978, it eventually replaced the original Indian National Congress) in West Bengal. She served in a variety of positions within the party and in other local political organizations and was a vocal critic of the state’s communist Left Front government (1977–2011). She was first elected to the Lok Sabha (lower house of the national parliament) in 1984 as a representative from her home district in south Kolkata. She lost that seat in the 1989 parliamentary elections but regained it in 1991 and was returned to office in each succeeding election through 2009.

In parliament Banerjee served in several administrative capacities, both within the party and in the union (national) government, including three cabinet-level ministerial posts: railways (1999–2001 and 2009–11), without a portfolio (2003–04), and coal and mines (2004). Although she was a rising star at the national level, Banerjee also retained strong ties to her home state of West Bengal, where she accumulated a large following and maintained a connection to her humble roots.

Trinamool Congress

By the late 1990s Banerjee had become disillusioned by what she saw as a corrupt Congress Party. In West Bengal she also wanted to confront the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist; CPI-M) more directly, and in 1997 she founded the All India Trinamool Congress, generally known as Trinamool Congress or TMC. The new party had limited success in the 1998 and 1999 national parliamentary elections but lost nearly all of those seats in the 2004 poll. In 2001 the TMC challenged the CPI-M in state legislative elections. Although the party won 60 seats, the communists remained firmly in power, and the TMC lost half of those seats in the 2006 state elections.

The Tata-Singur controversy

In December 2006 Banerjee led a protest against a proposed automobile plant in Singur, West Bengal. The state government offered the site to manufacturer Tata Motors to produce a new car model named Nano. This was fiercely opposed by farmers facing displacement, environmental activists, sections of Bengali civil society, and the TMC. Banerjee waged a 25-day hunger strike, which became a key factor in Tata Motors’ eventually relocating its proposed plant from West Bengal to Gujarat state. This issue became the catalyst for Banerjee’s comeback from near political obscurity, and she used it as a means of rallying a growing number of supporters in West Bengal. The TMC had a strong showing in the 2009 national parliamentary elections and joined the Congress Party’s ruling coalition as the second largest faction.

Chief minister of West Bengal

Despite her role at the central government level, Banerjee had her sights set on the 2011 state parliamentary elections and the real possibility of ousting the communists from power in West Bengal. Her popularity grew in the next two years as she campaigned against the land-acquisition scheme and championed human rights and the protection of women and children. In the 2011 elections the TMC won handily on the electoral promise of “Poriborton” (“Change”), winning 184 out of 294 seats in the state legislature and ending more than three decades of communist rule. Banerjee was sworn in as West Bengal’s first woman chief minister on May 20.

The TMC won two more state assembly elections, in 2016 and 2021, with Banerjee retaining the chief minister’s post. During these years, she was seen as one of the most outspoken critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the center. The TMC prevailed over the BJP in the hotly contested West Bengal elections of 2021. However, Banerjee lost the election to the BJP candidate in the Nandigram constituency. She was sworn in as chief minister regardless and later won a by-election from the constituency of Bhabanipur, which allowed her to keep the post.

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Banerjee’s administration has worked toward advancing West Bengal’s economic development, promoting education, and improving social equality. Several pro-woman initiatives have been implemented, such as Kanyashree (“Girl Child”), which promotes education for women and aims to prevent child marriage, and Lakshmir Bhandar (“Lakshmi’s Repository”), which provides basic financial assistance to women ages 25–60.

Corruption scandals

Banerjee’s government and TMC members have been accused of corruption and implicated in financial scandals. Among these was the Saradha scam, a Ponzi scheme run by an entity called the Saradha Group; the scam emerged in 2013 and several TMC legislators were questioned in the investigation that followed. In 2024 Banerjee was widely criticized for the alleged cover-up of the sexual assault and murder of a female trainee doctor at a government-run medical college and hospital in Kolkata. She was accused of attempting to protect the principal of the institution, and widespread protests called for her resignation, which she ignored. In deference to the protests, she appointed a new police chief in Kolkata and transferred several officials in the West Bengal health department.