Do we like Mamata Banerjee?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Real welfare wins and a trans development board, set against a divisive March 2026 speech, sharp criticism over RG Kar and a Supreme Court notice.
Mamata Banerjee was born in Kolkata in 1955, and her father, a freedom fighter, died when she was 17. She came up through the Congress student wing, won a Lok Sabha seat at 29, and later held Union cabinet posts including Railways. She quit Congress to found the Trinamool Congress in 1998.
Her big break was taking on the 34-year Left Front government, with the Singur and Nandigram farmland protests drawing huge crowds. That carried her to power in 2011 as the state's first woman chief minister, and she won again in 2016 and 2021. She lost Nandigram in 2021 but came back via a by-election.
The harm check is mostly good, with one stain. Her government set up a Transgender Persons Development Board in 2016, which a minister says was the first of its kind, and trans people can get certificates by self-declaration. The stain is a March 2026 rally speech where she said that if her side wasn't around, a community would finish people off in a second; Alt News called it election-eve fear-mongering. BJP and CPI(M) leaders also condemned it.
The RG Kar case is the one that hurts. After the 2024 rape and murder of a junior doctor, doctors and others protested, and an allegation surfaced that police had offered money to the victim's family. She denied it, saying “I have never offered any money to the deceased doctor’s family.” She called it a smear on her government, and Millennium Post said it couldn't verify a TMC video offered as rebuttal.
Then there's the I-PAC row. The ED alleges she and state police entered the consultancy's premises during a January 2026 search and removed evidence, and it wants a CBI probe. The Supreme Court issued her notice and stayed state police FIRs against ED officers. She says the ED was trying to seize party documents before the election, and we found no final ruling.
On the real good: Kanyashree, her cash-transfer scheme to keep girls in school and delay child marriage, won the UN Public Service Award in 2017. It has enrolled more than four million girls. Lakshmir Bhandar, monthly aid for adult women, is another signature scheme, so women have had tangible reasons to back her.