Mamata Rejigs TMC’s Youth, Women Wings

Kolkata: Barely a week after Mamata Banerjee reappointed lawmaker Saayoni Ghosh as the TMC’s youth wing president as part of a major structural overhaul to tighten her grip over the organisation that now faces an existential crisis, the party chief has removed the Jadavpur MP from the position and replaced her with Arnab Banerjee, a youth leader, party sources said.

The party also replaced on Saturday Kolkata Dakshin MP Mala Roy with Alifa Ahmed, TMC MLA from Kaliganj in Nadia district, as the president of its women’s wing, the Trinamool Mahila Congress, they added.

Both Ghosh and Roy are perceived to have joined the band of TMC’s rebel MPs in Lok Sabha amid a major turmoil currently rocking the party, with the dissidents stating they will meet Speaker Om Birla on Monday with a letter to seek recognition as the “real TMC”, following the party’s electoral drubbing in the 2026 West Bengal Assembly polls.

With senior MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay allegedly also joining the rebel camp on Saturday, leaders of the breakaway faction claimed that 20 of the party’s 28 Lok Sabha members were already signatories to the said letter, including Ghosh and Roy. Dissident MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar has declared that the bloc, once recognised, would offer support to the BJP-led NDA in Parliament.

Following a mutiny by the party’s legislators in the state assembly, Banerjee had reconstituted the TMC’s organisational committee on June 5 — after dissolving all its former committees and frontal organisations across Bengal — packing the new leadership structure with party loyalists and old-timers in an apparent bid to revitalise the embattled party, where she, ironically, named both Ghosh and Roy for their respective posts.