U-turns mark Saayoni’s controversial political journey as she joins TMC rebel camp after party’s Bengal polls setback
Jadavpur MP Saayoni Ghosh’s political career has followed a familiar arc: ideological flexibility rewarded with rapid promotion, followed by allegations of financial impropriety, and finally, when the wind changes direction, a swift and self-serving exit. Her journey from a Left-leaning television actress to Mamata Banerjee’s handpicked youth face, and now to a rebel MP flirting with the NDA, raises uncomfortable questions about political conviction versus naked opportunism.
Before she was the poster child of Trinamool youth politics, Ghosh was known for her sympathies with the Left and her open criticism of the BJP. That she pivoted to the Trinamool Congress ahead of the 2021 Assembly polls was itself unremarkable in Bengal’s fluid political culture. What was remarkable was the speed of her ascent.
Despite losing her debut election from Asansol South to BJP’s Agnimitra Paul by under 4,500 votes, Ghosh was elevated within months to replace Abhishek Banerjee himself as president of the Trinamool Youth Congress—a post typically earned through years of organisational grind, not electoral defeat.
Former Trinamool spokesperson Kamal Hossain did not mince words about how this happened.
“Her rise in the Trinamool was meteoric definitely due to her close proximity to Abhishek and Mamata Banerjee,” he told The Sunday Guardian, adding that she had “no political background” yet was “catapulted” over party workers who had spent decades in the trenches.
A senior TMC leader close to Mamata Banerjee, speaking after Ghosh’s eventual defection, offered an even more damning assessment. The episode, he said, was “a lesson” for the party’s top leadership for consistently favouring “film artists rather than the party’s full-time workers and leaders”—an implicit admission that Ghosh’s rise was built on proximity, not merit.
Ghosh’s meteoric rise was accompanied by an equally meteoric accumulation of assets—and it did not go unnoticed.
In June 2023, the Enforcement Directorate summoned her in connection with the West Bengal teacher recruitment scam after her name surfaced repeatedly during the interrogation of Kuntal Ghosh, the expelled TMC youth leader arrested over the bribe-for-jobs racket. Investigators reportedly examined WhatsApp chats between Kuntal Ghosh and Saayoni Ghosh, along with photographs of the two together at party events.
More damaging was the account offered by Tapas Mondal, another arrested middleman in the scam, who alleged that Ghosh’s plush South Kolkata apartment and SUV had been paid for using proceeds of the recruitment racket. According to reporting at the time, ED sources suspected that Ghosh may have received a cut of the roughly Rs 20-22 lakh middlemen were extracting from each desperate job aspirant.
Ghosh’s own defence—that her wealth came entirely from her acting career—sat awkwardly with ED findings that she was, in the words of one report, far from among the city’s top-earning film stars, making her declared income difficult to reconcile with her lifestyle. She was grilled for roughly eleven hours in 2023, and again for about ten hours the following year, without the matter ever being conclusively resolved either way.
Even as questions about her finances mounted, Ghosh’s public conduct only grew more theatrical.
She courted controversy in 2021 for a since-deleted social media post juxtaposing a condom with a Shivling, which she later blamed on account hacking—an explanation that satisfied few.
In January 2024, at a public meeting in Bardhaman, she claimed Mamata Banerjee had built the colonial-era Curzon Gate, a howler that opposition leaders seized on gleefully.
Her 2026 campaign trail performances—reciting a devotional couplet about the Kaaba and Madina, launching into the Hanuman Chalisa, and quoting Sukanta Bhattacharya against the BJP in the same breath—were seen as a calculated, almost theatrical, exercise in vote-bank optics.
For years, Ghosh cultivated an image as an unwavering Mamata loyalist, going so far as to adopt the Chief Minister’s signature unstarched white saree as her own political uniform.
TMC MP Mahua Moitra, reacting to Ghosh’s eventual defection, said she felt “shocked” and confessed she had considered Ghosh “like my child, like my sister”—a sentiment that underscores just how blindsided the party’s old guard was by her exit.
Yet when the TMC suffered a bruising defeat in the 2026 Assembly elections, Ghosh’s loyalty evaporated almost overnight.
Having initially insisted that Mamata Banerjee had lost to “vote theft and looting” rather than the electorate, Ghosh reversed course within weeks, joining a bloc of roughly 20 rebel MPs led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar that ultimately merged with a little-known outfit, the NCPI, and signalled openness to backing the NDA in Parliament—the single largest parliamentary rupture in Trinamool’s history.
Mamata Banerjee responded by stripping her of the Youth Congress presidency, handing it instead to Arnab Banerjee.
Political commentator Raja Gopal Dhar Chowdhury told The Sunday Guardian: “A leader elevated without having earned her stripes, dogged for years by unresolved questions about the source of her wealth, and finally willing to abandon the very leadership that manufactured her political career the moment it stopped being useful to her. For a politician who built her image on performative devotion—to Mamata Banerjee, to secularism, to the party faithful—Saayoni Ghosh’s actual record suggests loyalty was always negotiable, and conviction, dispensable.”
