West Bengal’s post-election drama is more consequential than the familiar story of Indian political defection. The developments unfolding around the Trinamool Congress after its defeat by the Bharatiya Janata Party in May’s Assembly elections point to a newer mechanism of power consolidation.

The immediate facts remain fluid. On Tuesday, rebel Trinamool leader Ritabrata Banerjee claimed to have the support of 65 of the 80 MLAs elected to the Assembly on the party’s ticket. The crisis has also moved to Parliament. Twenty of the 28 Trinamool MPs in the Lok Sabha have expressed their desire to merge with a little-known ally of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance from Tripura, a rebel MP said.

Already, three of the 10 TMC Rajya Sabha MPs resigned from the party and the Upper House.

India is familiar with individual defections. Turncoats have allowed the recipient party to benefit from the votes, the organisation and the skills they brought with them. But the mechanism of switching parties is surrounded by legal constraints. It used to cause misgivings among voters and is ultimately very time consuming.

However, what is now happening in Bengal points to something more ominous. The object is not only the politician. It is the party, or at least enough of it to ruin its political relevance.

The term that best captures this mechanism is party absorption. It is a political operation through which legislators, MPs, grassroots organisations, local brokers and symbolic legacies are drawn from the Opposition into the orbit of the ruling dispensation.

This is not merely a split. It is an attempt to make the defeated opposition useful to the establishment.

Though the legal position of such a strategy remains unsettled, the political meaning is already visible – the disintegration of the assembly opposition.

One aspect is particularly interesting. The rebels are not simply leaving the Trinamool. They are trying to carry its inheritance with them. At least in the Assembly, they still claim Trinamool’s legislative weight, organisational residue and even Mamata Banerjee’s symbolic authority.

The move by the Trinamool parliamentary faction to merge with the small Nationalist Citizens Party of India shows how the party’s personnel can be absorbed through another organisation.

This is not a clean ideological split. The rebels have not repudiated Mamata Banerjee’s political universe. Instead, they are trying to separate Mamata Banerjee and most of what she has come to symbolise from Abhishek Banerjee, her organisational heir.

In their narrative, the early Trinamool Congress was a movement of struggle, welfare and Bengali pride. The later Trinamool became dynastic, consultant-driven, coercive and corrupt.

This distinction is politically convenient. It allows rebels to claim moral recovery without fully accounting for their own participation in the regime they now denounce.

Political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya’s 2023 account of Trinamool as “franchisee politics” helps explain why this is possible. Local leaders exercised territorial authority in exchange for loyalty to “Brand Mamata”. Once that brand lost office, many of the same actors could plausibly seek protection, relevance and opportunity elsewhere, because their local authority depended heavily on proximity to government, welfare delivery, contracts and administrative access.

Sociologist Angelo Panebianco in his book Political Parties: Organization and Power also helps clarify the situation. When Mamata Banerjee’s charisma is not routinised into durable institutions, defeat produces not programmatic debate but a scramble over inheritance.

Maharashtra was the earlier laboratory. Political scientist Ronojoy Sen has shown how the Shiv Sena and later the Nationalist Congress Party were weakened not by isolated defections alone, but by large blocs that claimed to be the authentic party and then aligned with the BJP-led ruling order.

Bengal extends that logic with a sharper regional consequence. Mamata Banerjee’s Bengali nationalism, once mobilised against Hindi-Hindu centralisation, is now at risk of being absorbed into a wider BJP-compatible Bengali parivar.

The BJP is an ideological party steeped in Hindu nationalism. Its rise was aided by organisational expansion and centralised authority as well as a measure of welfare populism. The party’s rise has taken place in a situation of “organisational diffusion” – it widened the ecology of its affiliates across civil society, culture, education, labour and service provision.

This stands in contrast to the person-centric, patronage-driven and wholly amorphous nature of the Trinamool.

Bengal also shows that the BJP can be highly accommodative when power is at stake. The Hindutva party is likely to face local tensions while absorbing the Trinamool rebels. Yet it is willing to accommodate rivals and even reward them if they strengthen the ruling formation.

This is the paradox of India’s anti-defection framework. In 1985, the Tenth Schedule was incorporated into the Constitution to prevent individual legislators from betraying party mandates. But the law privileges numerical thresholds: legislators will not be disqualified if at least two-thirds of the members of the legislature party agree to the merger with another outfit. This could encourage dissidents to organise mass rebellion rather than individual defection.

Opportunism does not disappear. It becomes collectivised.

The consequences go beyond Bengal. In the short term, such absorption could strengthen the ruling coalition’s parliamentary numbers and make constitutional change easier. It can also help governments push through policies, with reduced resistance. The Opposition’s ability to protect its supporters, fund its networks, influence local administration and sustain sympathetic media ecosystems diminishes. Industries that depend on proximity to political power adjust quickly.

In the long term, this may mark the exhaustion of leader-centred, patronage-heavy regional parties that lack ideological depth and internal democracy. The Trinamool had a charismatic leader. It had welfare policies. It had networks of MLAs, MPs, councillors, panchayat leaders, booth organisers, local brokers and welfare intermediaries. What it lacked was a durable organisation capable of surviving electoral defeat.

The question is not whether opposition parties can win elections. It is whether they can survive losing them. Without ideological clarity, internal institutions and grassroots resilience, electoral defeat may become only the first stage of political defeat. The second is organisational dismemberment. The third is absorption.

Niladri Chatterjee is Senior Lecturer and Researcher, Department of Cultural Sciences, Linnaeus University, Sweden; Affiliated researcher, University of Oslo, Norway. His email is niladri.chatterjee@lnu.se.

Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor, South Asian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway. His email is a.e.ruud@ikos.uio.no.