Three former TMC Rajya Sabha MPs — Sushmita Dev, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy, and Prakash Chik Baraik — joined the BJP in Kolkata, citing faith in PM Modi's development vision, according to Hindustan Times and Times of India. But India Herald's read is that the real engine is the TMC's internal cold war between Mamata Banerjee's old legislative guard and Abhishek Banerjee's ascendant circle.

Here is the arithmetic that should alarm Mamata Banerjee far more than any election result: three of her former Rajya Sabha MPs — Sushmita Dev, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy, and Prakash Chik Baraik — have walked into the BJP's arms in a single week. Not backbenchers. Not disgruntled block-level functionaries. Rajya Sabha members — the kind of people a party sends to the upper house precisely because it trusts them to hold the line when things get rough.

The line they held, it turns out, was their own patience. And it ran out.

According to the Times of India, Sushmita Dev — a former Rajya Sabha MP and once among the most prominent women faces of the TMC nationally — cited "growth under PM Modi's leadership" as her reason for switching. Sukhendu Sekhar Roy, a veteran lawmaker known for his sharp parliamentary interventions, echoed a similar sentiment about "development" at the induction event in Kolkata, as reported by Hindustan Times. Prakash Chik Baraik, the tribal face the TMC had carefully cultivated, rounded out the trio.

Three leaders. One week. One script: Modi's vision.

It is a neat, media-ready explanation. It is also, by any honest political reading, about thirty percent of the actual story.

Political Pulse

The whisper doing the rounds in Kolkata's political corridors — and it is loud enough now to barely qualify as a whisper — is that the TMC's internal power map has been redrawn so thoroughly over the past two years that anyone who owes their career to Mamata Banerjee personally, rather than to Abhishek Banerjee's new organisational machinery, now finds themselves on increasingly thin ice. The talk among party insiders, as widely discussed in Bengal political circles, is that Abhishek's consolidation of the TMC's organisational apparatus has left senior leaders feeling like tenants in a house they helped build.

Consider the pattern. Sushmita Dev's trajectory is perhaps the most telling. She left the Congress in 2021 to join the TMC — at a time when Mamata's party was the gravitational centre of India's opposition politics. Dev was given a Rajya Sabha seat, a signal of serious intent. But sources in TMC circles suggest that her influence within the party's decision-making had steadily eroded as Abhishek Banerjee's Diamond Harbour faction tightened its grip on candidate selection, fund allocation, and — crucially — the party's national outreach strategy. For someone who had been president of the All India Mahila Congress before her switch, being sidelined from national messaging was not just a demotion; it was an existential squeeze.

Sukhendu Sekhar Roy's case carries a different but equally revealing texture. A five-term Rajya Sabha veteran, Roy had been one of the TMC's most articulate voices in Parliament — the sort of lawmaker who could hold the floor on subjects ranging from constitutional amendments to agricultural distress. The talk in Bengal's political drawing rooms is that Roy's brand of deliberative, institution-respecting politics had become an awkward fit for a party increasingly built around rapid-response social media combat and street-level mobilisation — the playbook Abhishek's team runs. When a party no longer needs your particular skill, it does not fire you. It simply stops calling.

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The BJP, for its part, is not being subtle about what this means. Inducting three Rajya Sabha-level leaders in one week is not recruitment — it is a choreographed spectacle designed to project a message: the TMC is hollowing out from within. Amit Shah's Bengal operation has long followed a specific playbook — identify the disaffected, let the internal TMC friction do the softening, then offer a red carpet at precisely the moment the leader's frustration becomes publicly unsustainable. It happened with Suvendu Adhikari. It happened with Mukul Roy. The playbook is not new. What is new is the velocity.

The Generational Fault Line No One Will Say Out Loud

What makes this particular wave of defections structurally different from earlier exits is the nature of the grievance. Earlier departures — Suvendu's, for instance — were driven by local power contests, turf wars over specific districts or Assembly segments. The current wave, India Herald's assessment suggests, is driven by something more fundamental: a generational and ideological fault line within the TMC itself.

Mamata Banerjee built the Trinamool Congress as a personality-driven insurgency against the Left Front — and the leaders who rose with her were moulded in that tradition: parliamentary debaters, mass-contact politicians, people who could hold a press conference and a protest march with equal ease. Abhishek Banerjee's TMC is a different animal — data-driven, social-media-first, organisationally centralised in a way that values operational loyalty over individual stature. For the old guard, this is not merely a change of style. It is a change of species.

The official framing — "Modi's development vision" — is the respectable exit ramp every defector takes. It lets them avoid saying the uncomfortable truth: that they are leaving not because the BJP pulled them, but because the TMC pushed them. The BJP is the destination of convenience, not necessarily of conviction. But in politics, convenience often outlasts conviction anyway.

What This Sets in Motion

Watch Bengal over the next three to six months. If India Herald's read of the underlying dynamic is correct — that this is a structural purge-by-neglect rather than isolated defections — then the current trickle is likely to become a more visible stream as the 2026 municipal elections and the run-up to 2027 panchayat polls create new pressure points. Every TMC leader who is denied a ticket or a meaningful role will now have a live, recent precedent of senior colleagues who switched and were received with fanfare.

For Mamata Banerjee, the strategic dilemma is acute. Cracking down on potential defectors risks accelerating the very exodus she wants to prevent — the "if you suspect me, I might as well go" spiral that has destroyed parties before. But doing nothing signals to Amit Shah's operation that the door remains open and unguarded.

For Abhishek Banerjee, the departures may privately feel like pruning — clearing the old wood to let his own network grow unimpeded. But parties that lose their institutional memory in a hurry tend to discover, around election time, that the voters those old leaders carried do not automatically transfer to the new management.

And for the BJP, Bengal remains the great unfinished project. The party surged to 18 Lok Sabha seats in 2019 but has struggled to convert that into durable state-level organisation. Every TMC veteran who walks in brings a Rolodex, a network, and — most valuably — a detailed map of where the TMC's ground-level machinery is weakest. Whether the BJP can integrate these leaders without the factional turf wars that plagued its earlier Bengal recruits is the question that will decide whether this is a genuine realignment or merely a trophy cabinet.

Three Rajya Sabha MPs did not leave because Narendra Modi's development pitch suddenly became irresistible in July 2026. They left because the party they helped build no longer felt like theirs. The question Mamata Banerjee should be asking tonight is not why they left — but how many more are sitting in her party right now, phones on silent, waiting for the call from IHG.

Allegations and claims reported here are attributed to named sources and remain unverified unless independently confirmed; matters of party-internal dynamics are reported as analysis and attributed discourse, not as established fact.

Reported and written with AI assistance under India Herald's editorial standards; a human editor governs publication.

Key Takeaways

• Three former TMC Rajya Sabha MPs — Sushmita Dev, Sukhendu Sekhar Roy, and Prakash Chik Baraik — joined the BJP in Kolkata in a single week, citing PM Modi's development vision, according to Times of India and Hindustan Times.
• The pattern of departures points to a deeper structural issue: the TMC's generational power shift under Abhishek Banerjee is marginalising Mamata-era veterans who built the party's parliamentary credibility.
• The BJP's Bengal strategy under Amit Shah follows a proven playbook — let internal TMC friction soften targets, then offer high-profile inductions timed for maximum spectacle.
• For Mamata Banerjee, the strategic dilemma is acute: cracking down risks accelerating the exodus, while inaction signals open season to the BJP's recruitment machine.
• Watch for municipal and panchayat election cycles in Bengal — every TMC leader denied a meaningful role now has a recent, high-profile precedent for switching.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Sushmita Dev leave the TMC and join the BJP?

According to the Times of India, Sushmita Dev cited growth under PM Modi's leadership as her reason for joining the BJP. However, political analysts and TMC insiders suggest that her declining influence within the party — as Abhishek Banerjee's faction consolidated control over candidate selection and national outreach — was a significant underlying factor.

Who else left the TMC along with Sushmita Dev?

Former Rajya Sabha MPs Sukhendu Sekhar Roy and Prakash Chik Baraik also joined the BJP at the same event in Kolkata, according to Hindustan Times.

What does this mean for Mamata Banerjee and the TMC ahead of Bengal elections?

India Herald's analysis suggests that this wave of defections signals a structural generational fault line within the TMC. As municipal and panchayat elections approach, every senior leader denied a meaningful role now has a high-profile precedent for switching — potentially accelerating the exodus.

Is the BJP's Bengal strategy working?

The BJP has successfully recruited several high-profile TMC leaders since 2020, but converting these inductions into durable ground-level organisation remains its biggest challenge in West Bengal, according to political observers tracking Bengal politics.