Abhishek Banerjee meets Rahul Gandhi in Delhi amid Trinamool crisis

2 min readUpdated: Jun 10, 2026 02:30 PM IST

Abhishek Banerjee meets Rahul Gandhi in Delhi amid Trinamool crisis, agency raids

A day after TMC chief Mamata Banerjee met Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee met Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, with sources saying that the meeting was to discuss the coordination in the INDIA bloc.

Senior leaders in both parties maintained that the meeting was to discuss the INDIA bloc. “It is to discuss how the bloc goes ahead,” said a senior TMC leader. The source said: “They discussed the state of affairs in Bengal, how the TMC and the Congress can work together to strengthen their position in West Bengal as INDIA bloc partners… and prepare together for 2029 to counter the BJP.”

The meeting between the two top leaders comes a day after the West Bengal CID on Tuesday conducted searches at the TMC’s central party office in Kolkata’s Kalighat and at the office of TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee on Camac Street as part of its investigation into the alleged Assembly signature forgery case.

Since the results of the elections in West Bengal were announced, the TMC has been grappling a crisis while it deepened on Monday, with the rebellion among the party’s MPs. The rebel camp has claimed that at least 20 of the party’s 28 Lok Sabha MPs have decided to form a separate bloc and align with the BJP-led NDA.

Since the crisis, the relationship between the Congress and TMC has become better with Mamata herself leading from the front on making sure the Congress knows its importance in the INDIA bloc. During Monday’s INDIA bloc meeting, Mamata was one of the few leaders who defended the Congress when other allied criticized the grand old party.

Asad Rehman is with the national bureau of The Indian Express and covers politics and policy focusing on religious minorities in India. A journalist for over eight years, Rehman moved to this role after covering Uttar Pradesh for five years for The Indian Express.

During his time in Uttar Pradesh, he covered politics, crime, health, and human rights among other issues. He did extensive ground reports and covered the protests against the new citizenship law during which many were killed in the state.

During the Covid pandemic, he did extensive ground reporting on the migration of workers from the metropolitan cities to villages in Uttar Pradesh. He has also covered some landmark litigations, including the Babri Masjid-Ram temple case and the ongoing Gyanvapi-Kashi Vishwanath temple dispute.

Prior to that, he worked on The Indian Express national desk for three years where he was a copy editor.

Rehman studied at La Martiniere, Lucknow and then went on to do a bachelor's degree in History from Ramjas College, Delhi University. He also has a Masters degree from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia. ... Read More

Tags:

TMC