India, June 11 -- As Trinamool Congress splinters in the aftermath of its 2026 defeat in West Bengal, former chief minister and party supremo Mamata Banerjee faces a possibility that would have seemed unlikely even six months ago: returning to the Congress-the very party she'd left to build her political empire.

It began in 1984, in Jadavpur, where a young woman from an obscure middle-class family ran on a Youth Congress ticket against Somnath Chatterjee, one of CPI(M)'s formidable figures. She won that contest, in one of the first signals that Banerjee was not a typical politician.

But the Congress tested her patience. By the late 1990s, she had concluded that the party would never seriously confront the Left, and in 1998, she walked o...