Rebel Trinamool MPs meet Lok Sabha speaker, demand recognition as separate bloc

Claiming the support of 20 of the Trinamool Congress’s (TMC) 28 Lok Sabha members, the party’s rebel MPs on Sunday met Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and conveyed to him that they had merged with a Tripura-based party and want to sit in the House as a separate bloc.

Minutes earlier, the Mamata Banerjee camp reached out to the Speaker and urged him not to accord “any recognition, status, or facility to any purported separate group or faction of the AITC”.

“We 20 MPs, who were elected from the AITC, have met the Speaker and given him a letter urging him to allow us to sit as a separate bloc. And these 20 MPs, who are more than two-thirds (of the strength of the AITC), this faction, is with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India. We will work for the country and work with the NDA under the leadership of the Prime Minister,” TMC MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar told reporters.

“We have merged with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India. It is a political party. It is a recognised regional party. We have merged with it,” veteran TMC MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay said. He said it would be decided in the court which was the “real TMC”. The Nationalist Citizens Party of India is a little-known outfit based in Tripura.

Among the MPs who met the Speaker along with Ghosh Dastidar and Bandyopadhyay are Satabdi Roy, Yusuf Pathan, Saayoni Ghosh, June Malia, and Jagdish Basunia. The rebel MPs went into a huddle at the official residence of Union Minister Bhupender Yadav, who was the BJP’s Bengal poll in-charge, before proceeding to meet the Speaker at his 20, Akbar Road residence.

With the rebel MPs having met the Speaker, the split in the Lok Sabha wing of the TMC is now formal. Mamata Banerjee has already lost control of the Legislature Party in Bengal after about 60 of the party’s 80 MLAs seized its control and elected Ritabrata Banerjee as their leader.

Abhishek’s letter

Minutes before the rebels met the Speaker, TMC MPs Sagarika Ghose and Kirti Azad — who are with the Mamata faction — handed over a letter by Abhishek Banerjee, the leader of the TMC Parliamentary Party, to the Speaker saying the party was a “single, indivisible political party”.

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“The legislative party in the Lok Sabha derives its very existence from, and remains an emanation of, the political party. There is in law only one AITC, one Leader of the Party in the House, and one Whip, all of whom hold office by authority of the political party and its competent organisational authority. No member or set of members can, by their own volition, carve out a parallel ‘group’ or ‘faction’ of the same party and claim independent recognition within the House,” he wrote in the letter.

Citing a 2023 judgment of the Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court on the Maharashtra political crisis and provisions of the Tenth Schedule, he said the law does not recognise the “splintering of a political party into competing groups as a permissible event; it treats such conduct, instead, through the lens of disqualification”.

He argued that it was the political party and not the legislature party which is supreme.

“The Court held that it is the political party, and not the legislature party, that appoints the Whip and the Leader of the party in the House, and that the direction to vote in a particular manner, or to abstain, is issued by the political party and not the legislature party. It follows that no breakaway set of members may appoint their own Leader or Whip, or seek recognition as a distinct entity, in derogation of the authority of the political party,” he said.

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Arguing that the Speaker “recognises the political party (and) not rival factions,” he said “the Court held that where two or more factions claim to be the political party, the Speaker is to determine, prima facie, who the political party is for the purpose of adjudicating disqualification petitions under Paragraph 2(1) of the Tenth Schedule. The framework thus contemplates ascertainment of the one true political party, not the conferral of independent recognition upon a faction.”

Pointing out that the purported demand of the rebel TMC MPs to recognise them as a separate group or faction of the AITC was “unknown to law and impermissible”, he said “after the Ninety-first Amendment, the only lawful route by which a body of members may lawfully realign is a merger within the meaning of Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule, when two conditions are satisfied – namely when the political party merges and, cumulatively, two-thirds of the legislature party switches.”

“The claims which are making the rounds in the media presume that only one condition has to be satisfied which is incorrect. Therefore, assuming without admitting in any manner that two-thirds of the legislative party has switched, there has been no merger of the political party with any party or any creation of a new party called AITC,” he said.

He said “any voluntary act by which a member or members hold themselves out as a party/faction, repudiate the authority of the Party’s Leader and Whip, or function independently of the political party, would attract disqualification under Paragraph 2(1)(a) of the Tenth Schedule as a voluntary giving up of membership of the political party, and under Paragraph 2(1)(b) in the event of voting or abstention contrary to the Party Whip.”

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Abhishek Banerjee urged the Speaker to “treat the AITC as a single political party represented in the House solely through its duly authorised Leader and Whip, and decline to accord any recognition, status, or facility to any purported separate group or faction of the AITC and afford the AITC an opportunity of being heard before any decision is taken on any communication” by the rebel group.

He said the Trinamool Congress “reserves its rights, including its right to initiate appropriate proceedings under the Tenth Schedule to the Constitution, in respect of any conduct falling foul of its provisions.”