West Bengal | I-card is not valid

It’s an image that, going by the origin story, she drew herself—encoding the spirit of her break from the Congress in 1998. Mamata Banerjee’s twin flowers on a grass bed, blooming as if straight from the soil, gathered organic meaning with each euphoric moment she fronted. It was there at Singur and Nandigram. It saw off the Left Front in 2011, a visual reminder of what they had lost. The party name rubbed it in: ‘Trinamool’, or Grassroots, prefixed to Congress. The word-image dyad saturated the political space in Bengal, colonising everything for the next 15 years. That spell—longer in span than the magic it wove—was broken this summer. Now the rains are washing away its signs.