‘Didi’s party, dada’s dol’: Experts on what factionalism explains about TMC’s defeat in West Bengal

The harder question is structural. It concerns the dense web of rival groups and allegiance networks that hold party politics in Bengal together. To ask it, we need to revisit a concept Indian political science had quietly retired: factionalism.

A concept that fell out of fashion

In the 1960s and 70s, factions were central in Indian politics. Political scientists Rajni Kothari and Paul Brass viewed factionalism as the structure that mediated competition inside the Congress system. Historian Ranajit Guha remarked in 1976 that factions appeared everywhere, like Russian submarines. After the 1980s, the concept faded as regional parties rose, and by the 2000s, dismissing factionalism as an orientalist category became fashionable.

Political scientist Françoise Boucek has argued that this dismissal was premature. Factionalism, in her account, is not a static feature of weak parties. It is a dynamic process, a continual partitioning of subgroups within larger groups.

In India, where most parties depend less on ideology than on patronage and territorial control, such rivalries are structural conditions of political life. As one of us argues in a forthcoming study (in Contesting Populism, Cambridge University Press), this frame helps make sense of an organisational form that older concepts struggle with.

Franchisee politics and the dadar dol

The starting point is political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya’s account of the TMC as a franchisee-based political system. Mamata commands universal loyalty, but unlike the CPI(M), the party has no regimented hierarchy. Local strongmen use ‘brand Mamata’ to build territorial power. In return for loyalty, they receive autonomy and distribute access, protection, and patronage downward.

Young workers describe this in Bengali as “didir party, dadar dol”. Mamata’s party, the local leader’s group. The party is the brand. The dol is the brand’s face in your para, ward, or panchayat. Aspirants are recruited not by the TMC as an abstract organisation, but by a dada who commands influence and can help them locally.

This is where factionalism becomes useful again. The dol is not a faction in the classical Western sense. It is rarely ideological or institutionally coherent. It is a fluid allegiance network organised around distribution and rivalry, with shifting boundaries. What appears externally as “the party” is a layered ecosystem of competing factions, held together by electoral incentives and the supreme leader’s authority.

Supply, demand, and the safety valve

It helps to separate what factions do from why parties tolerate them. On the supply side, the dol offers status, protection, and the promise of becoming someone. On the demand side, the party needs these networks because it lacks a disciplined cadre. Factions mobilise voters, manage elections, distribute patronage, and monitor one another.

District leaders interviewed for the underlying study were candid. Multiple competing dols in a locality were preferable to a single dominant one. Rivalry kept information flowing upwards and prevented any one network from challenging district leadership.

The architecture was held together by the electoral cycle. Between elections, factions expanded, absorbed weaker rivals, splintered, and occasionally turned violent.

Leadership intervened only as elections approached, distributing tickets and suspending rivalries for the campaign. One worker put it sharply: we share the same plate and compete for more food, but we all recognise the plate’s value and are prepared to defend it. Elections are the safety valve that keeps rivalries in check.

What 2026 reveals

This is the architecture that faltered. Besides SIR, the Election Commission’s replacement of sections of the state bureaucracy and police with centrally appointed officials and security personnel sharply curtailed the local dols’ traditional ability to manage voter turnout, mobilisation, booth operations, and electoral flow within their territories.

The strength of a local dada lay not merely in intimidation or patronage, but in his ability to embed himself within a locality and convert dense neighbourhood networks into reliable electoral outcomes. But when 91 lakh names disappeared from the rolls, and electoral management shifted away from local administrative mediation, the territorial labour of these networks was marginalised — in some cases, rendered almost inconsequential.

The second rupture emerged from within the organisation itself. Abhishek Banerjee’s I-PAC-driven political management — with its surveys and metrics-based candidate selection — increasingly bypassed older allegiance networks. The 2023 panchayat elections had already offered an early warning when thousands of TMC rebels filed independent nominations after being denied tickets.

That discontent now appears to have deepened into open factional fallout. In the aftermath of the defeat, several local leaders have directly blamed Abhishek and I-PAC for sidelining political networks that once mediated candidate selection and electoral management. At the grassroots, allegiances are shifting with remarkable speed: auto unions, street vendors, and local bazaars that displayed TMC colours until recently are now openly adorned in saffron.

Why the concept matters again

The factionalism lens explains what vote-share arithmetic cannot. It tells us why the TMC could absorb RG Kar but not the SIR, and why a generational transition that does not reorganise the underlying allegiance networks leaves both old and new organisational logics fragile.

The lens travels. The BRS in Telangana, the post-Jayalalithaa AIADMK, the YSRCP in Andhra, and, arguably, the AAP exhibit elements of a similar architecture. A charismatic leader. Decentralised local intermediaries. Distributive outreach as the currency of allegiance. Election-regulated rivalry. Bengal simply reveals the logic in an especially visible form.

Indian political science moved away from factionalism because it associated the term with weak institutions and disorderly politics. What Bengal reveals is that these allegiance networks are not residual democratic features, but enduring mechanisms through which power is organised, distributed, and contested. The factions defended the plate as long as the food kept arriving. Indian political science would do well to look at the plate again.

Dr. Ritanjan Das is a university lecturer in contemporary South Asian politics at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Vignesh Karthik KR is a postdoctoral researcher in Indian and Indonesian politics at KITLV-Leiden.