Ousted as TMC chief by rebels, Mamata Banerjee’s options dwindle: What next?

This move came amid the ongoing tug of war between the rebels and the party led by Banerjee, whom they removed as chairperson at a special session on Monday. In response, Banerjee has sent the EC a list of members who comprise the TMC’s actual national working committee, including her as the chairperson, heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee as the national general secretary and the party’s Lok Sabha leader, Derek O Brien and Dola Sen as joint secretaries, Subhashish Chakraborty as treasurer, and Sovondeb Chatterjee as the leader in the Assembly.

The rebel MLAs’ decision to replace her as the TMC chairperson has pushed Banerjee — already battling a breakaway group of Lok Sabha MPs who have aligned with the NDA and the resignation of three Rajya Sabha MPs — into a corner. With the rebel camp looking at the EC for recognition as the real TMC, Banerjee’s letter to the poll body is a counter as she fights to hold on to the party she founded in 1998.

For the moment, the former Chief Minister, whom the rebels want to remain in an advisory role, is left with a shrinking band of loyalists — Kalyan Banerjee, Madan Mitra, Mohua Moitra, Sougata Roy, Nadimul Haq, and Kunal Ghosh are part of the new committee — and is slowly losing options both in Bengal and Delhi. The rebels are likely preparing the ground to stake claim to the party name and symbol of “jora ghash phool (twin flowers with grass)”. In addition to this, the TMC’s bank accounts, with Rs 440 crore in them, have been frozen following a complaint by the rebels, who have demanded an audit.

In retaliation, the TMC has expelled several rebel MLAs and former ministers in the rebel faction, including Roy; MLAs Javed Khan, Firhad Hakim, Rathin Ghosh, Biplab Mitra, and Sabina Yeasmin; and former ministers Aroop Biswas and Snehashis Chakraborty, who are all part of their 30-member national working committee.

However, the rebels are not perturbed by their expulsions, confident they have the numbers on their side. Apart from more than 60 MLAs, more than 40 councillors from different civic bodies attended the special session. “We are the real Trinamool Congress. We have a Leader of the Opposition (LoP) as per our choice, the choice of more than two-thirds in the Assembly. Obviously, we have a claim on the symbol. If it is challenged, we will show our majority. Apart from the MLAs. we have support from the elected councillors and leaders from different parts of the state,” said a senior MLA with the rebel bloc.

The loyalists publicly claimed they were confident about retaining the party symbol and access to the bank accounts, with sources close to Mamata Banerjee saying they were waiting for the rebels to move the EC. The party will then challenge the rebels in the polling body and move court on the issue. Chattopadhyay has already filed a case against the Assembly Speaker in the Calcutta High Court for recognising Ritabrata as the Assembly LoP.

Moitra, the Krishnanagar MP, told The Indian Express, “How can you put the cart before the horse? They don’t have the symbol. Let them first try and have the symbol and then form the national working committee or any other committee they want. That’s not possible. According to the party constitution, Mamata Banerjee is chairman for life. One cannot change that.”

On the freezing of the bank accounts, Moitra said, “First they made Aroop (Biswas) write a letter to the bank. That failed since Aroop was not the treasurer. Then some MLA filed a police complaint. How can the police freeze the account? They need the court’s permission. That was not done. Also, it is a fact that on April 10 the very MLA who complained and others got Rs 25 lakh for elections from the same account of the party.”

A senior MLA and Mamata loyalist said the rebels were trying to “deliberately hurt Mamata Banerjee and the party”. “They are trying to forcefully grab everything. We will go to court when the time comes, but it is a lengthy process. Meanwhile, keeping our flock together is a challenge. Even Firhad Hakim and Aroop Biswas went away.”

What Maharashtra shows

As the splits in the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra show, the disputes are likely to drag on and simultaneously reach three constitutional institutions: the EC over party name and election symbol, the Speaker over disqualification proceedings, and the Supreme Court, where some of the matters remain pending. These institutions were required to separately examine competing claims by rival groups over the original party, legitimacy, and their majority.

In both the Sena and NCP disputes, the EC and the Speaker treated the legislative majority as a decisive factor in their rulings in favour of the breakaway factions led by Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar, respectively. However, the Supreme Court in its May 11, 2023 verdict in the Sena matter said that while deciding disqualification proceedings, a Speaker cannot rely on a “blind appreciation” of numerical strength alone to consider which faction represents the political party. The court also held that “political party” and “legislature party” are distinct concepts and cannot be conflated. Uddhav Thackeray’s Sena (UBT), while challenging the Speaker’s ruling before the top court, has argued that by relying heavily on the legislative majority, constitutional authorities effectively revived the “split doctrine” that Parliament had removed two decades earlier.

With the legal battles in the Sena and NCP cases continuing for months — in some cases, they hang fire even today despite the end of the legislators’ terms — the road ahead for a depleted TMC under Mamata Banerjee is likely to be a long-winding one, made even tougher by the fact that it won’t have access to the money required to mount a pushback.

Election law does not mention anything about a party’s assets, apart from its symbol, and Supreme Court judgments in the past have made it clear that parties need to move civil courts, not the EC, for control of assets. This process could likely take years as the poll body’s decision on the symbol dispute may get challenged in the Supreme Court.