Kolkata, Sep 22 The 20 Lok Sabha MPs who quit the TMC and aligned themselves with the NCPI have sought another four weeks to respond to notices issued by Speaker Om Birla on petitions seeking their disqualification under the anti-defection law, as the deadline granted to them expired on Tuesday.
Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI) parliamentary chairperson Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar said the MPs were yet to collate all documents required for their response and had therefore sought another extension from the Lok Sabha Secretariat.
She said the MPs got a letter from the Lok Sabha Secretariat on August 26 seeking their reply regarding TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee’s letter to the Lok Sabha Speaker requesting cancellation of the membership of the 20 NCPI Parliamentarians.
“We had then written to the Lok Sabha Secretariat seeking three weeks to reply, which was granted. Now we need some more time as 20 MPs are yet to collate all the documents. So we have sought four more weeks. We have sent a letter to the Lok Sabha secretariat,” Ghosh Dastidar told PTI.
The TMC’s Mamata Banerjee faction was quick to seize on the extension request.
“Which party are they in now — do they need time to say that? These turncoats, opportunists and ungrateful people make tall claims, conduct Facebook revolutions and win elections on anti-BJP votes only to serve the BJP, but cannot even answer a notice?” TMC leader Kunal Ghosh said in a sharp reaction.
Asked about Ghosh’s remarks, Ghosh Dastidar said she did not want to comment.
“It is for the court and the Lok Sabha to decide,” she said.
The latest move comes against the backdrop of renewed speculation over the political destination of the rebel MPs. Last week, rebel MP Jagadish Chandra Barma Basunia had claimed that 17 of the 20 NCPI MPs would join the BJP before or after Durga Puja.
The claim was rejected by fellow dissident MPs, while the BJP also distanced itself from it.
The dispute over the MPs’ status began soon after 20 of the TMC’s 27 Lok Sabha MPs quit the party in June following its defeat in the West Bengal Assembly elections and joined the NCPI, extending support to the BJP-led NDA.
Lok Sabha records, however, continue to list them as TMC members, while their request for recognition as a separate NCPI parliamentary group remains a matter of contention.
TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee had filed petitions before the Speaker in June seeking their disqualification under the Tenth Schedule.
The proceedings had already entered the judicial arena after the Supreme Court on August 25 agreed to hear Banerjee’s plea seeking an expeditious decision by the Speaker on the disqualification petitions.
The request for another four weeks thus puts the institutional contest over the MPs’ status into a fresh phase, with the rival camps taking sharply different positions on the meaning of their June realignment.
“For the TMC, the defections represent a coordinated political shift that warrants disqualification. The dissident MPs have maintained that their decision followed the loss of confidence in the existing TMC leadership and have sought to establish a separate political identity,” a Kolkata-based political analyst said.
That rupture has meanwhile spilled beyond Parliament.
In the West Bengal Assembly, a large group of TMC MLAs backed Ritabrata Banerjee’s claim to the Leader of the Opposition’s post, rejecting the nominee supported by the Mamata Banerjee camp. The dissidents subsequently convened a special session, elected senior MLA Arup Roy as chairperson and announced a parallel organisational structure.
The Election Commission’s intervention over the party’s name and symbol has added another institutional layer to the split.
The Mamata Banerjee faction was allotted the name Mamata All India Trinamool Congress and the Football Player symbol, while the rival faction led by Ritabrata Banerjee was allotted Democratic Trinamool Congress and the Envelope symbol.
The two factions are now entering the October 6 bypolls in Nandigram and Rejinagar under identities different from the one with which they had originally entered the electoral contest.
With 20 MPs constituting a sizeable bloc in the Lok Sabha and their future alignment carrying implications for both the NDA and the fractured opposition space in Bengal, the disqualification proceedings have emerged as another arena in the larger battle for control of the TMC’s political legacy.
For now, however, the 20 MPs are seeking to keep that battle in abeyance, asking the Speaker for four more weeks before they put their legal defence on record.
(PTI News)
