New Delhi:
The 20-strong rebel faction of the Trinamool Congress’s Lok Sabha MPs will merge with the Nationalist Citizens’ Party — a little-known Bengali-oriented political party from Tripura. Making the announcement today after meeting Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and submitting their letter, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, who is leading the rebel faction, said they will sit separately in parliament and “work under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”.
“We command two-thirds majority. We will be part of the NDA and work under the leadership of the Prime Minister,” she added.
The move will deepen the crisis within the Trinamool — which has 28 MPs in Lok Sabha — and drastically bring down the opposition numbers in the lower house ahead of the Monsoon session of parliament.
Sources said the decision was taken to avoid legal complications that inevitably come up in forming a separate bloc.
Earlier today, Trinamool’s Kirti Azad and Sagarika Ghose met Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to submit a letter from number two and its parliamentary party chief Abhishek Banerjee, which urged him not to accept the rebel bloc since it is always the political party and not the Legislature Party that stands supreme.
“The legislative Party in the Lok Sabha derives its very existence from and remains an emanation of the political party… 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,” the letter read.
Quoting a relevant order from the court, the letter said, “The law does not recognise the splintering of a political party into competing groups as a permissible event”. Instead, it treats such conduct through the lens of disqualification, he had added.
“The Speaker recognises the political party, not rival factions. 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,” the letter read.
