On 1 January 1998, Mamata Banerjee launched the All India Trinamool Congress after breaking with the Congress. Twenty-eight years later, an Election Commission interim order has barred both her group and a rival faction from using the party name and the “Flowers and Grass” symbol she designed - the same emblem that appeared on ballots when her new outfit first contested a Lok Sabha election months after it was born.
The freeze, issued on Thursday ahead of West Bengal bypolls, is a legal holding pattern under the Election Symbols Order. It does not decide who “owns” the party. It does underline a rare situation: the politician who created the organisation cannot, for now, campaign under the name and mark that defined its identity.
Why she left Congress
Banerjee had spent more than two decades in the Congress. By the mid-1990s she was the most visible anti-Left face in West Bengal, built on street protests - including the 1993 march to Writers’ Buildings in which police firing killed 13 Congress workers. She argued that the state Congress leadership, then headed by Somen Mitra, was too close to the CPI(M) and unwilling to confront Jyoti Basu’s government head-on. The charge was often summed up as the “watermelon” line: green outside, red inside.
An AICC session in Kolkata in August 1997 made the split public. Banerjee was not invited. She held a rival rally outside Netaji Indoor Stadium the same day and announced a new platform. In December 1997 she was expelled for anti-party activity. On 1 January 1998 the All India Trinamool Congress was formally founded. “Trinamool” means grassroots. The symbol - two flowers rising from grass, ‘Jora Ghas Phul’ - was drawn by Banerjee and linked to a Kazi Nazrul Islam line about two buds on one stem, Hindu and Muslim.
The Election Commission later reserved that symbol. The party’s first test came quickly: the 1998 Lok Sabha polls. TMC won seven seats from Bengal. In 1999 it won eight, joined the BJP-led NDA, and Banerjee became Union railway minister. In 2000 it took the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. It was still far from state power. The 2001 Assembly election gave it 60 seats as principal opposition; 2006 was a setback.
From breakaway to government
The party’s rise was not linear. Alliance with the NDA ended after the Tehelka defence scandal. The turning point was the anti-land acquisition agitation in Singur and Nandigram (2006–08) against the Left Front’s industrial policy. Those movements, more than parliamentary arithmetic, recast TMC as the vehicle that could end 34 years of CPI(M)-led rule. In 2011 Banerjee became West Bengal’s first woman chief minister. The party held the state through 2016 and 2021 and remained in office until 2026.
That record is now shadowed by an internal split. The Commission has recognised two rival groups - one led by Banerjee, the other associated with Arup Roy and Leader of the Opposition Ritabrata Banerjee - and said neither may use “All India Trinamool Congress” or the reserved flowers-and-grass mark until it decides the dispute under Paragraph 15 of the 1968 Symbols Order. Both sides must propose alternative names and free symbols for the immediate bypolls.
The irony is structural, not sentimental. Banerjee did not inherit a party machine; she built one after the Congress organisation in Bengal would not follow her line against the Left. The name and the sketch she made on founding day were the first public claim of that break. The Commission’s freeze does not erase that history. It does mean that, for the next electoral round, the founder cannot put that name or that drawing on the ballot. The dispute over who represents the original party is now a formal proceeding. The origin of the party is not.
The Election Commission’s freeze lands directly on the coming bypolls in Nandigram and Rejinagar in West Bengal and the Nagaon Lok Sabha seat in Assam, where Banerjee’s group has already fielded candidates in all three contests. Those nominees cannot go to the voters under the All India Trinamool Congress name or the reserved flowers-and-grass symbol. Both factions were told to submit, by 11 a.m. on 18 September, three preferred alternative names and three free symbols in order of priority; the Commission will then allot a temporary identity for this round until it decides which group, if either, is the recognised party.
