You can no longer ignore the fault lines in the Trinamool. Twenty of their own have made it public by telling Speaker Om Birla they’ve joined up with the not-very-well-known NCPI and want to be a bloc of their own in the House. They are looking for a way to be protected under the rules as the session approaches.
Why the timing matters in Delhi’s numbers game
To get any constitutional amendments through when the Monsoon Session opens on July 21st, the government has to have the support of two-thirds of those in the room. You only have to look at the 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill to see how thin the margins can be: 298 for, 238 against.
Now you have these defectors from the Trinamool and the math is different. With 20 or so making their position known, the ruling side has more of an edge than it did a while back. And by asking for separate seats, the rebels are trying to make their presence felt from the start.
Why NCPI became the chosen vehicle
It comes down to Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule. If you have a merger and at least two-thirds of your party are on board, you don’t get hit with disqualification. The rebels are using the NCPI to sidestep that and put in for recognition at the same time.
“We have merged with the NCPI and we’ll go for the Trinamool name when Parliament is back in July,” says veteran MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay. “Let the court sort out who is the real TMC.” It is a way to hold your ground until there is a final word on it.
They have been to the Speaker and put it off as a matter of procedure, not some act of insubordination. What happens next is up to him and how he reads the case they have made under the anti-defection provisions.
This is what they are after:
– Their own table and what goes with it in the House
– Some form of stop-gap recognition for the NCPI tie-up
– A platform to make their case as the true TMC
Inside NCPI: small footprint, sudden prominence
The Nationalist Citizens Party of India is an unrecognised outfit from Tripura with very little to show for in terms of elections. They put in their papers with the Election Commission in Bengal back in January 2023, but didn’t make an appearance in Tripura until a few months on.
Shiuli Kundu is the one at the helm, with her sister Shewly as the treasurer on paper. The EC has them down for Rs 1.13 lakh in all the donations they’ve taken in, and their symbol is an ink pen with seven strokes to it.
There is some difference of opinion on how they fared in their first foray. One of their men, who wouldn’t put his name to it, put it at four in Tripura in 2023 – two under the flag and probably two Independents with the party behind them.
There are also records of three seats in the running for that election.
We have two NCPI candidates on paper: 54-year-old Jahangir Ali of Kailashahar, in Unakoti, and 65-year-old Barjeda Tripura from Chawmanu in Dhalai. In all, they put up 822 votes between them – 536 in the ST-reserved Chawmanu and 286 in Kailashahar.
You can see the party’s standing in the numbers. Even in Kailashahar, where the Trinamool had 696 to come in third, it was only a hair’s breadth over NOTA at 537. In Chawmanu, the Trinamool was fourth with 566, with 500 for NOTA right behind. The NCPI didn’t even hold on to its deposits in the Assembly races it was in.
And yet, for a party that has been on the sidelines, the rebels’ move is what will put an NCPI in Parliament, no general election victory required. It’s a matter of anti-defection math, not the vote count.
Some numbers on the NCPI:
– Put on the register in Bengal in January 2023
– Has seen in Rs 1.13 lakh in donations
– An ink pen with seven strokes is its symbol
TMC makes its case to the Speaker
The Trinamool has put forward a hard line on this. Abhishek Banerjee, head of the Parliamentary Party, wrote to the Speaker on June 10, making a point of a 2023 Constitution Bench verdict in Maharashtra to draw a line between a political party and its arm in the legislature.
In his view, you need a proper merger of the parent party and for two-thirds of the legislature side to make the switch for any protection under Paragraph 4 to apply. He made the case that it is the party, not some offshoot, that puts in the Whip and the Leader. Factions can’t just name themselves.
Banerjee asked the Speaker to see AITC as one body, with only the appointed Leader and Whip having a say, and to withhold any perks from breakaway elements. He also put it to him that going their own way could be grounds for disqualification under 2(1)(a) and 2(1)(b).
Now it is up to the Speaker’s office to make a call, at least on the face of it, on who is the real party when it comes to these petitions. How he rules in the short term will have an impact on the rebels’ hand.
A case from the Northeast
It is not without parallel. Back in 2016 in Arunachal, the Congress was unseated when most of its MLAs, with the exception of then CM Nabam Tuki, defected to the People’s Party of Arunachal. By the end of that year, Pema Khandu and 32 of his PPA colleagues were with the BJP, which gave them 45 in a 60-member House.
That left the PPA with 10 and the Congress with 3. Fast forward to 2019 and the BJP had 41 of 60. It is a good example of how things can be put in order once the institutions make up their minds.
We’ll be watching in July. When Parliament is back in session, the rebels want to be known as Trinamool, with the NCPI as the legal means to do so. The TMC, with the Supreme Court on its side, will say the original party is the only one with the authority to merge.
With the question of where to sit and whether to be recognised, and with courts in the mix, this will be as much about procedure as posturing. Who gets to be the voice of the Trinamool in the House is at stake, and with so much on the table in the coming session, it could well be the difference in some key votes.
