Mamata Banerjee’s biggest problem perhaps is that she characteristically usurps all wisdom unto herself which is why every single henchman in her party plays a subservient role and dittoes everything she says. And, every time she suffers because of any of her misplaced ideas, she throws a fit and blames others.Long before this Lok Sabha elections took place, it was known to all that there were multiple splits within the Trinamool Congress. There were many number of groups, each led by local satraps who never saw eye to eye with each other. There was largescale, rampant corruption at the lowest levels of the party, all of which she had chosen to largely ignore, at least officially.Even in ET’s case, there were times when the paper had asked her directly how she planned to keep the multiple factions in check and whether she had thought of ways to intervene and stop corruption at the lowest levels by elected representatives of her party. The Trinamool Congress supremo had chosen not to answer such questions.Late at night on May 16, Mamata axed her agriculture minister Malay Ghatak for the defeat of Dola Sen at Asansol, who allegedly had complained that Ghatak’s non-cooperation had cost her the seat, which was won by the BJP’s Babul Supriyo. Whether or not such was the case is subject of internal fact-finding by the party, but it was no secret that many local leaders within her own party were extremely peeved at her choice of candidates for the Lok Sabha polls and quite a few of them actually did not participate too actively in ensuring the victory of their party candidates.It is now that Mamata has woken up to the reality which she had always known existed, but never bothered to take steps to sort out. There were municipal councillors who openly demanded slush money, there were hundreds of petty ‘dadas’ in every locality in Kolkata and elsewhere who did the same — giving the party a bad name. Still 34 seats out of 42 were won by the Trinamool, in much the same way that the Left Front won one election after another for 34 years. And, it is indeed a very creditable performance, no matter how it was achieved.As they say, everything is fair in love and war. This was war, and obviously a very large section of voters were with her. It’s time that one sings a requiem for the CPM and its defunct leadership and it goes entirely to the credit of Mamata that she single-handedly destroyed her one-time rivals. But what she now has to contend with is a force far superior to the best CPM had, even in its heydays.Mamata will now have to contend with a country-wide organisation, called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS, which was born in 1925 at the Nagpur house of its founder Doctor Kesava Rao Baliram Hegdewar, and which had taken up the ‘lathi-danda’ as a way of its life way back in 1926! Mamata has grown up on a diet of the Congress and the CPM. The RSS, never prominent in Bengal, isn’t what she is accustomed to.As one of Kolkata’s most prominent industrialists were to tell ET two days before the Lok Sabha poll results were announced on May 16: “Call it the Modi wave or whatever you would want to, but to me this is a contest between the superb organisational strength of the RSS versus the Rest of India.”Tarun Gogoi of Assam ruefully acknowledged much the same thing, when he lost Assam’s Lok Sabha contest to the BJP! Prime minister-designate Narendra Modi is RSS first and BJP thereafter. And, the RSS is a grassroots organisation with millions of extremely disciplined workers, united under a central command.Mamata’s is a party of rag-tag commoners, a motley mix of the semi-literate and unemployed, who are often at variance with each other for social, personal or political reasons and who use the Trinamool platform to further their own little sectoral interests. The CPM by comparison had a more dedicated workforce so long as the party was in power.Mamata has been joined by legions of such former comrades, who left their mother party as rats do from a sinking ship. Members of the CPM’s fabled poll-rigging machinery, these converts have helped Mamata win elections so far, at least in Bengal. But, with a super-strong BJP at the Centre led by Modi, the organisational bonding of the RSS and “money” no problem at all, Mamata and her fragmented workforce could be up against huge odds as the months roll by.That is something which perhaps Mamata also realises which explains the frown she carries post victory. With the RSS now expanding in every state on a war footing — as the surprise 10-seat win of the NDA and its allies in the North East have proven this time — Mamata’s hopes of expanding her influence base in other states would be further under pressure.