Overview
Mamata Banerjee (born 5 January 1955) is an Indian politician and lawyer who served as the eighth Chief Minister of West Bengal, becoming the first woman to hold that office. She is the founder and president of the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC), which she established in 1998 after separating from the Indian National Congress. She became the party's second president in 2001 and is often referred to by supporters as "Didi", meaning elder sister in Bengali.
Before her tenure as Chief Minister, Banerjee served in the Union Cabinet on multiple occasions. She held the portfolio of Minister of Railways twice, becoming the first woman to do so. She was also the second woman to serve as Minister of Coal, and held charge of the ministries of Human Resource Development, Youth Affairs and Sports, and Women and Child Development at different points in her parliamentary career.
Banerjee rose to wider political prominence through her opposition to the land acquisition policies of the Left Front-led government in West Bengal, particularly in connection with the proposed Special Economic Zone at Singur, where she campaigned on behalf of affected agriculturalists and farmers. In 2011, she led the AITC-led alliance to a landslide victory in the West Bengal assembly election, ending the 34-year tenure of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front government. She led the party to another decisive victory in the 2021 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election.
Banerjee represented the Bhabanipur constituency in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly from 2011 to 2021. In the 2021 state election she contested from Nandigram and lost to Suvendu Adhikari of the Bharatiya Janata Party, although her party secured a large majority of seats. She thus became the third Chief Minister of West Bengal to lose from her own constituency, after Prafulla Chandra Sen in 1967 and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in 2011. She subsequently returned to the assembly by winning the Bhabanipur bypoll. She is also noted as the first sitting Chief Minister in India to argue as a lawyer in the Supreme Court.