Biography of a street fighter: Mamata Banerjee and making of a permanent political scrapper
On February 4, Mamata Banerjee created a bit of history. She became both the petitioner and pleader in the Supreme Court, causing eyebrows to be raised. But we shouldn't have been surprised. Showing up for the good fight is Mamata's credo, her political signature. She just can't outsource the good fight. She is not a politician who occasionally fights. She's a fighter who occasionally governs.
August 16 and Kolkata share a crimson history. In 1946, the streets ran red following Muhammad Ali Jinnah's call for Direct Action, leaving behind a legacy of blood and fury.
In 1990, the air was thick with a similar, humid rage. Mamata Banerjee, then a 35-year-old firebrand Youth Congress leader, stood at the head of a rally against rising bus fares. Behind her surged a wave of students, labourers, and the urban poor -- their chants echoing through the narrow, humid corridors of South Kolkata's Hazra crossing.
A shadow slithered behind her. In his hands was a heavy wooden staff, the kind wielded by lathi-armed enforcers. The first blow landed on her skull with a sickening crack, a sound spectators later described as audible even over the roar of the crowd. Mamata's knees buckled. As she began to fall, a second strike followed. Her scalp split open. Blood poured down her face, soaking her white cotton sari and turning it a stark, violent crimson.
SB Ganguly, the surgeon who treated her, later described the injury in clinical terms that only amplified its brutality: "She was bleeding profusely from a deep head injury. The skull had fractured. Another inch, and the blow could have been fatal. It was a miracle she survived."
THE BANDAGE AS BATTLE FLAG
Most politicians would have retreated into a quiet, dignified convalescence. Mamata, however, wore her bandages like war paint. For months, she appeared in public with thick white gauze wrapped around her skull. At every press conference, every rally, and every street corner meeting, the bandage remained. It became a haunting reminder of Kolkata's violent political legacy.
The ruling CPI(M) dismissed her as a "drama queen", their cadres whispering that she was merely milking the incident for sympathy. But the people of Bengal saw something else: a woman who refused to hide her wounds, turning a broken skull into a symbol of state-sponsored brutality.
When she finally spoke, her words carried the weight of iron: "They can break my head, they can break my bones, but they cannot break my spirit." This wasn't mere political rhetoric; it was a threat. She had crossed a threshold of physical sacrifice that most politicians only perform.
From this trauma, she extracted a singular, career-defining lesson: in a crowded marketplace of grievances, the person who shows up — physically, visibly, and undeniably — wins the fight.
THE AUDACITY OF PRESENCE
Fast forward 35 years to February 4, 2026. Mamata is now 70 and the Chief Minister of Bengal for nearly 15 years. But the same philosophy is still on show as the street fighter climbed the steps of the Supreme Court.
Her hair has turned grey, but the uniform is the same: the white cotton sari and slippers — a brand of austere defiance — is now magnified by a black shawl.
It isn't just the attire that makes headlines today. It is the sheer audacity of her presence. On Thursday, Mamata came to Delhi to personally appear before the Supreme Court to challenge the Election Commission of India and its Special Intensive Review (SIR) of electoral rolls.
Inside the courtroom, she sat humbly in the back benches. She was anything but unobtrusive. When her case was called, she moved to the front row to stand alongside her lawyers rather than behind them.
At one point, she leaned forward to interject, prompting the bench to gently remind her that she had legal counsel for a reason. Later, she intervened, seeking the courts permission to speak and present her case with the same aplomb as the battery of black coats she had hired to present her case.
No Chief Minister before her has argued their state's case in person before the highest court. It is politically unprecedented, legally unorthodox, but quintessentially Mamata.
Vintage Mamata, actually: confrontational, personal, utterly incapable of delegating the fight to someone else. She has built her politics around a simple philosophy: She is the medium, message and the messenger of her party. So she has to show up everywhere.
THE MESSENGER AS THE MESSAGE
"Election Commission is WhatsApp commission," she roared in the court, declaring herself a "bonded labourer from an ordinary family".
Constitutional experts on TV panels questioned the propriety of a sitting CM acting as a petitioner-advocate. Opposition leaders mocked her for "cheap theatrics". But in Bengal, her supporters would have seen their Didi refusing to hide behind legal technicalities. They would have seen a gutsy, diminutive woman holding fort even in the most intimidatingly unfamiliar setting of the Supreme Court on their behalf.
The Supreme Court appearance isn't actually about legal strategy. It is about the photograph and the headline. It is about every television channel cutting to live coverage of her defiance.
We saw this same pattern in January 2026, during the Enforcement Directorate (ED) raids on I-PAC chief Prateek Jain's Kolkata home. The ED alleged that coal scam money had been routed to the TMC's Goa campaign.
While other leaders would have issued a sterile statement from the CMO, Mamata drove to the scene. Emerging with a green file, she accused the ED of stealing her party's 2026 election strategies. "Is it their job to grab our plans?" she raged.
The ED later moved the Calcutta High Court, alleging she had "snatched" documents and devices. For Mamata, the legal risk was secondary to the visual: a 70-year-old woman confronting federal investigators. She effectively hijacked the narrative, turning a corruption probe into a story of personal martyrdom.
THE CALCULATED CHAOS
There is a defining pattern here: Mamata Banerjee consistently collapses the space between the institution and the individual. The state's position becomes her physical position. It is bewildering and often legally dubious, but it is devastatingly effective.
She did not become a scrapper at Hazra Crossing; she was born one. In 1984, she walked into Jadavpur, the intellectual fortress of the Left, and defeated Somnath Chatterjee, a legal titan whose speeches were studied in law schools. With no money, no dynasty, and no political godfather, she had the audacity to tell Bengal’s elite that their time was up.
She has never stopped.
If Hazra Crossing was the moment Mamata Banerjee discovered she could survive, the clashes at the Writers' Building, the red-brick erstwhile seat of power in Bengal, were where she vowed to conquer.
There were two pivotal moments at the Writers' Building that solidified her legend: one was a personal eviction, the other a massacre on the streets.
THE PREGNANT VICTIM AND THE VOW
On January 7, 1993, Mamata Banerjee stormed into the secretariat as an insurgent. She brought with her a hearing-and-speech-impaired girl who was heavily pregnant after being raped, allegedly by a CPI(M) worker.
Mamata demanded an immediate audience with Chief Minister Jyoti Basu. When Basu refused to meet her and left the building via a back gate, Mamata launched a three-hour sit-in right in front of his chamber. The response was brutal. A massive police contingent was called in to clear the siege.
In the ensuing chaos, police allegedly dragged Mamata, a sitting Union Minister, by her hair, threw her into a prison van, and hauled her to the Lalbazar lock-up.
As she was being dragged out, she made a famous, cinematic vow: "I will only return to this building after I have dislodged the CPI(M) from power." It was a promise that would take her 18 years to fulfill.
THE MASSACRE AT THE GATES
Months later, on July 21, 1993, she returned to the vicinity of the Writers' Building with thousands of Youth Congress supporters. Their demand was specific: they wanted mandatory photo-voter identity cards to stop the "scientific rigging" they accused the Left of orchestrating.
Kolkata became a war zone. As the marchers reached the Esplanade area, barely a kilometre from the secretariat, the police intervened.
The confrontation was not a mere dispersal; it was a bloodbath. Thirteen people were killed on the spot. Hundreds more were injured. Mamata herself was caught in the melee, suffering injuries that required her to be rushed to the hospital.
For Mamata, it was 'Martyr's Day'. Every year since, July 21 has been the most important date on her political calendar, a day she uses to remind Bengal that the path to the Writers' Building was paved with the blood of her supporters.
THE SCRAPPER'S CODE
Today, after surviving assassination attempts, political isolation, and the full weight of central investigative agencies, she still cannot resist a brawl.
In 2021, she campaigned for the Assembly polls from a wheelchair, turning a leg injury into a symbol of war. In 2023, at a summit of opposition leaders in Patna, she argued, walked out in a huff, and returned to argue some more.
Allies are often exasperated, but those who know her history understand: this is not a performance. Mamata is a street fighter who happened to become Chief Minister.
The job changed her title, but it never changed her instincts. Mamata Banerjee isn't a politician who occasionally fights. She's a fighter who occasionally governs.
When presented with political danger, she doesn't calculate odds or consult focus groups. She remembers the moment the wooden staff cracked her skull and she realized she could survive anything. Then, she throws the first punch.
THE TRAP OF THE ETERNAL CENTER
In the age of social media, where attention is the ultimate currency, the politician who can make themselves the center of every story holds an unbeatable advantage. Other Chief Ministers govern through bureaucracy; Mamata governs through presence.
However, this strategy contains its own trap: when you make yourself the center of everything, everything becomes your fault. By personalising every success, she automatically personalises every failure.
The RG Kar Medical College crisis in 2024 illustrated this perfectly. The rape and murder of a trainee doctor became a political wildfire not just because of the heinous nature of the crime, but because Mamata's instinct was to personally manage the response.
She showed up at the hospital. She directed the investigation. When the public felt the investigation was flawed and the victim's family felt unheard, the anger didn't just target the police or the hospital, it targeted Mamata personally. The street fighter found herself facing a street she could no longer control.
SINGUR: THE SCRAPPER'S FOLLY
Bengal has often paid the cost of her instincts. The Singur movement of 2006 defines her power to dismantle and destroy.
It began when the Left Front government acquired nearly 1,000 acres of fertile, multi-crop land for Tata Motors to build the Nano, the world's "cheapest car".
To the government, it was the "industrial rebirth" of Bengal. To Mamata, it was a "forcible land grab".
In December 2006, Mamata began a historic 26-day hunger strike in central Kolkata. She grew frail, her voice raspy, but her presence at the protest site became a magnet for global media and intellectuals. She framed the struggle as David versus Goliath: the poor farmer against the combined might of a Marxist state and India's biggest corporate titan.
Ratan Tata, facing a wall of political hostility and safety concerns for his staff, famously declared, "You cannot run a factory with police protection," and moved the plant to Sanand, Gujarat.
Mamata won the battle, Singur became the catalyst that ended 34 years of Left rule, but the economic and structural cost to West Bengal has been staggering.
Beyond the cash, the Singur effect branded her as "anti-industry". The state lost a generational opportunity to host an automotive hub of 70+ vendors, which would have generated thousands of direct and indirect jobs.
UPA WOE: FRIEND OR FOE?
In September 2012, Mamata Banerjee was not just the Chief Minister of Bengal. She was a critical ally in the UPA-II coalition government at the centre -- her Trinamool Congress propping up Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's administration.
But when the central government announced it would allow Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail and increase diesel prices, Mamata staged a dharna.
The optics were surreal: a sitting Chief Minister and Union Cabinet Minister, squatting on the street with her supporters, protesting her own coalition's policies.
When the central government didn't budge, she pulled the Trinamool Congress out of the UPA coalition entirely, bringing the government to the brink of collapse.
But for Mamata, these costs were secondary to the political principle. She showed up, she fought, and she drove the giant away.
THE INESCAPABLE NARRATIVE
Thirty-five years after the blood at Hazra Crossing, Mamata remains the inescapable centre of Bengal's political universe. This is not necessarily because she has the best policies, the most transparent government, or the most efficient administration. It is because she has mastered the fundamental rule of political survival in the 24-hour news cycle: the story belongs to whoever shows up.
Policy papers are forgotten. Legal arguments are dense and boring. But a woman in a white cotton sari, standing in the eye of a storm and refusing to back down; that is a story people understand. That is a visual they remember.
It is the strategy that has helped her survive: against the Left, against the Congress, against the BJP.
Thirty-five years since that blood-soaked sari, Mamata holds Bengal with one unyielding creed: I am here. I am fighting.
The street-fighter reigns both on the streets and in the Writers Building. For Mamata, every day is Direct Action day.
August 16 and Kolkata share a crimson history. In 1946, the streets ran red following Muhammad Ali Jinnah's call for Direct Action, leaving behind a legacy of blood and fury.
In 1990, the air was thick with a similar, humid rage. Mamata Banerjee, then a 35-year-old firebrand Youth Congress leader, stood at the head of a rally against rising bus fares. Behind her surged a wave of students, labourers, and the urban poor -- their chants echoing through the narrow, humid corridors of South Kolkata's Hazra crossing.
A shadow slithered behind her. In his hands was a heavy wooden staff, the kind wielded by lathi-armed enforcers. The first blow landed on her skull with a sickening crack, a sound spectators later described as audible even over the roar of the crowd. Mamata's knees buckled. As she began to fall, a second strike followed. Her scalp split open. Blood poured down her face, soaking her white cotton sari and turning it a stark, violent crimson.
SB Ganguly, the surgeon who treated her, later described the injury in clinical terms that only amplified its brutality: "She was bleeding profusely from a deep head injury. The skull had fractured. Another inch, and the blow could have been fatal. It was a miracle she survived."
THE BANDAGE AS BATTLE FLAG
Most politicians would have retreated into a quiet, dignified convalescence. Mamata, however, wore her bandages like war paint. For months, she appeared in public with thick white gauze wrapped around her skull. At every press conference, every rally, and every street corner meeting, the bandage remained. It became a haunting reminder of Kolkata's violent political legacy.
The ruling CPI(M) dismissed her as a "drama queen", their cadres whispering that she was merely milking the incident for sympathy. But the people of Bengal saw something else: a woman who refused to hide her wounds, turning a broken skull into a symbol of state-sponsored brutality.
When she finally spoke, her words carried the weight of iron: "They can break my head, they can break my bones, but they cannot break my spirit." This wasn't mere political rhetoric; it was a threat. She had crossed a threshold of physical sacrifice that most politicians only perform.
From this trauma, she extracted a singular, career-defining lesson: in a crowded marketplace of grievances, the person who shows up — physically, visibly, and undeniably — wins the fight.
THE AUDACITY OF PRESENCE
Fast forward 35 years to February 4, 2026. Mamata is now 70 and the Chief Minister of Bengal for nearly 15 years. But the same philosophy is still on show as the street fighter climbed the steps of the Supreme Court.
Her hair has turned grey, but the uniform is the same: the white cotton sari and slippers — a brand of austere defiance — is now magnified by a black shawl.
It isn't just the attire that makes headlines today. It is the sheer audacity of her presence. On Thursday, Mamata came to Delhi to personally appear before the Supreme Court to challenge the Election Commission of India and its Special Intensive Review (SIR) of electoral rolls.
Inside the courtroom, she sat humbly in the back benches. She was anything but unobtrusive. When her case was called, she moved to the front row to stand alongside her lawyers rather than behind them.
At one point, she leaned forward to interject, prompting the bench to gently remind her that she had legal counsel for a reason. Later, she intervened, seeking the courts permission to speak and present her case with the same aplomb as the battery of black coats she had hired to present her case.
No Chief Minister before her has argued their state's case in person before the highest court. It is politically unprecedented, legally unorthodox, but quintessentially Mamata.
Vintage Mamata, actually: confrontational, personal, utterly incapable of delegating the fight to someone else. She has built her politics around a simple philosophy: She is the medium, message and the messenger of her party. So she has to show up everywhere.
THE MESSENGER AS THE MESSAGE
"Election Commission is WhatsApp commission," she roared in the court, declaring herself a "bonded labourer from an ordinary family".
Constitutional experts on TV panels questioned the propriety of a sitting CM acting as a petitioner-advocate. Opposition leaders mocked her for "cheap theatrics". But in Bengal, her supporters would have seen their Didi refusing to hide behind legal technicalities. They would have seen a gutsy, diminutive woman holding fort even in the most intimidatingly unfamiliar setting of the Supreme Court on their behalf.
The Supreme Court appearance isn't actually about legal strategy. It is about the photograph and the headline. It is about every television channel cutting to live coverage of her defiance.
We saw this same pattern in January 2026, during the Enforcement Directorate (ED) raids on I-PAC chief Prateek Jain's Kolkata home. The ED alleged that coal scam money had been routed to the TMC's Goa campaign.
While other leaders would have issued a sterile statement from the CMO, Mamata drove to the scene. Emerging with a green file, she accused the ED of stealing her party's 2026 election strategies. "Is it their job to grab our plans?" she raged.
The ED later moved the Calcutta High Court, alleging she had "snatched" documents and devices. For Mamata, the legal risk was secondary to the visual: a 70-year-old woman confronting federal investigators. She effectively hijacked the narrative, turning a corruption probe into a story of personal martyrdom.
THE CALCULATED CHAOS
There is a defining pattern here: Mamata Banerjee consistently collapses the space between the institution and the individual. The state's position becomes her physical position. It is bewildering and often legally dubious, but it is devastatingly effective.
She did not become a scrapper at Hazra Crossing; she was born one. In 1984, she walked into Jadavpur, the intellectual fortress of the Left, and defeated Somnath Chatterjee, a legal titan whose speeches were studied in law schools. With no money, no dynasty, and no political godfather, she had the audacity to tell Bengal’s elite that their time was up.
She has never stopped.
If Hazra Crossing was the moment Mamata Banerjee discovered she could survive, the clashes at the Writers' Building, the red-brick erstwhile seat of power in Bengal, were where she vowed to conquer.
There were two pivotal moments at the Writers' Building that solidified her legend: one was a personal eviction, the other a massacre on the streets.
THE PREGNANT VICTIM AND THE VOW
On January 7, 1993, Mamata Banerjee stormed into the secretariat as an insurgent. She brought with her a hearing-and-speech-impaired girl who was heavily pregnant after being raped, allegedly by a CPI(M) worker.
Mamata demanded an immediate audience with Chief Minister Jyoti Basu. When Basu refused to meet her and left the building via a back gate, Mamata launched a three-hour sit-in right in front of his chamber. The response was brutal. A massive police contingent was called in to clear the siege.
In the ensuing chaos, police allegedly dragged Mamata, a sitting Union Minister, by her hair, threw her into a prison van, and hauled her to the Lalbazar lock-up.
As she was being dragged out, she made a famous, cinematic vow: "I will only return to this building after I have dislodged the CPI(M) from power." It was a promise that would take her 18 years to fulfill.
THE MASSACRE AT THE GATES
Months later, on July 21, 1993, she returned to the vicinity of the Writers' Building with thousands of Youth Congress supporters. Their demand was specific: they wanted mandatory photo-voter identity cards to stop the "scientific rigging" they accused the Left of orchestrating.
Kolkata became a war zone. As the marchers reached the Esplanade area, barely a kilometre from the secretariat, the police intervened.
The confrontation was not a mere dispersal; it was a bloodbath. Thirteen people were killed on the spot. Hundreds more were injured. Mamata herself was caught in the melee, suffering injuries that required her to be rushed to the hospital.
For Mamata, it was 'Martyr's Day'. Every year since, July 21 has been the most important date on her political calendar, a day she uses to remind Bengal that the path to the Writers' Building was paved with the blood of her supporters.
THE SCRAPPER'S CODE
Today, after surviving assassination attempts, political isolation, and the full weight of central investigative agencies, she still cannot resist a brawl.
In 2021, she campaigned for the Assembly polls from a wheelchair, turning a leg injury into a symbol of war. In 2023, at a summit of opposition leaders in Patna, she argued, walked out in a huff, and returned to argue some more.
Allies are often exasperated, but those who know her history understand: this is not a performance. Mamata is a street fighter who happened to become Chief Minister.
The job changed her title, but it never changed her instincts. Mamata Banerjee isn't a politician who occasionally fights. She's a fighter who occasionally governs.
When presented with political danger, she doesn't calculate odds or consult focus groups. She remembers the moment the wooden staff cracked her skull and she realized she could survive anything. Then, she throws the first punch.
THE TRAP OF THE ETERNAL CENTER
In the age of social media, where attention is the ultimate currency, the politician who can make themselves the center of every story holds an unbeatable advantage. Other Chief Ministers govern through bureaucracy; Mamata governs through presence.
However, this strategy contains its own trap: when you make yourself the center of everything, everything becomes your fault. By personalising every success, she automatically personalises every failure.
The RG Kar Medical College crisis in 2024 illustrated this perfectly. The rape and murder of a trainee doctor became a political wildfire not just because of the heinous nature of the crime, but because Mamata's instinct was to personally manage the response.
She showed up at the hospital. She directed the investigation. When the public felt the investigation was flawed and the victim's family felt unheard, the anger didn't just target the police or the hospital, it targeted Mamata personally. The street fighter found herself facing a street she could no longer control.
SINGUR: THE SCRAPPER'S FOLLY
Bengal has often paid the cost of her instincts. The Singur movement of 2006 defines her power to dismantle and destroy.
It began when the Left Front government acquired nearly 1,000 acres of fertile, multi-crop land for Tata Motors to build the Nano, the world's "cheapest car".
To the government, it was the "industrial rebirth" of Bengal. To Mamata, it was a "forcible land grab".
In December 2006, Mamata began a historic 26-day hunger strike in central Kolkata. She grew frail, her voice raspy, but her presence at the protest site became a magnet for global media and intellectuals. She framed the struggle as David versus Goliath: the poor farmer against the combined might of a Marxist state and India's biggest corporate titan.
Ratan Tata, facing a wall of political hostility and safety concerns for his staff, famously declared, "You cannot run a factory with police protection," and moved the plant to Sanand, Gujarat.
Mamata won the battle, Singur became the catalyst that ended 34 years of Left rule, but the economic and structural cost to West Bengal has been staggering.
Beyond the cash, the Singur effect branded her as "anti-industry". The state lost a generational opportunity to host an automotive hub of 70+ vendors, which would have generated thousands of direct and indirect jobs.
UPA WOE: FRIEND OR FOE?
In September 2012, Mamata Banerjee was not just the Chief Minister of Bengal. She was a critical ally in the UPA-II coalition government at the centre -- her Trinamool Congress propping up Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's administration.
But when the central government announced it would allow Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail and increase diesel prices, Mamata staged a dharna.
The optics were surreal: a sitting Chief Minister and Union Cabinet Minister, squatting on the street with her supporters, protesting her own coalition's policies.
When the central government didn't budge, she pulled the Trinamool Congress out of the UPA coalition entirely, bringing the government to the brink of collapse.
But for Mamata, these costs were secondary to the political principle. She showed up, she fought, and she drove the giant away.
THE INESCAPABLE NARRATIVE
Thirty-five years after the blood at Hazra Crossing, Mamata remains the inescapable centre of Bengal's political universe. This is not necessarily because she has the best policies, the most transparent government, or the most efficient administration. It is because she has mastered the fundamental rule of political survival in the 24-hour news cycle: the story belongs to whoever shows up.
Policy papers are forgotten. Legal arguments are dense and boring. But a woman in a white cotton sari, standing in the eye of a storm and refusing to back down; that is a story people understand. That is a visual they remember.
It is the strategy that has helped her survive: against the Left, against the Congress, against the BJP.
Thirty-five years since that blood-soaked sari, Mamata holds Bengal with one unyielding creed: I am here. I am fighting.
The street-fighter reigns both on the streets and in the Writers Building. For Mamata, every day is Direct Action day.