Mamata Banerjee removes Saayoni, Mala from key posts amid TMC rebellion

Mamata Banerjee has swiftly removed Saayoni Ghosh and Mala Roy from leadership roles in the TMC’s youth and women’s wings, replacing them with loyalists Arnab Banerjee and Alifa Ahmed.

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 on Saturday removed the Jadavpur MP from the position and replaced her with Arnab Banerjee, a youth leader, party sources said.

The party also replaced 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.

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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.

She had reappointed the party’s Diamond Harbour MP and her nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, as its national general secretary.

“These replacement decisions were already taken at a party meeting held three days ago,” a senior Rajya Sabha MP of the TMC said, asking not to be named.

“Mamata didi doodh kola diye shaap pushechhilo (Mamata didi had nurtured people with milk and honey, but they turned out to be snakes),” he added, referring to all 20 dissenting party MPs in the Lok Sabha.

In a related development, TMC’s Beleghata MP Kunal Ghosh was named the president of the party’s North Kolkata organisational district. The position was earlier held by Sudip Bandyopadhyay.

“In the wake of the recent developments, the party has asked me to shoulder responsibilities for the post,” Ghosh told reporters.

Meanwhile, veteran parliamentarian Saugata Roy was named the chief advisor of the TMC’s Lok Sabha wing which currently has eight MPs still owing allegiance to Mamata Banerjee.