Abhishek Banerjee says no TMC return for the 20 MPs who walked out

Trinamool Congress national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee told a student rally in Kolkata on Friday that not one of the MPs who left the party after the Assembly defeat will be allowed back. “Although our supreme leader Mamata Banerjee has the final say, I say this with utmost conviction: not a single traitor who flourished under the TMC and left the hands of our workers in these testing times to save their backs will be allowed to return,” he said at the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad foundation-day meeting on Cathedral Road.

The line matters because of a letter from the other end of the country. Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla has issued notices to 20 rebel TMC MPs who merged with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India and offered support to the NDA. They have seven days to answer a disqualification petition filed by the Diamond Harbour MP, Abhishek Banerjee himself, under the Tenth Schedule. Among the names that have appeared in the rebel list are Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Sujoy Ghosh, Sudip Bandyopadhyay, Shatabdi Roy and Yusuf Pathan.

Kalyan Banerjee, another TMC Lok Sabha MP, said he would work to have those 20 removed from their seats. He called Suvendu Adhikari, now on the other side of Bengal politics, a disgrace and said his days as chief minister were numbered. Mamata Banerjee, speaking separately, told loyalists not to join the BJP under pressure. “If necessary, spend a month eating jail food, but do not surrender politically,” she said. She also alleged that the BJP had “hijacked” the last Assembly election through the Election Commission.

How the split formed

The Assembly results were declared on 4 May. By 15 May, Abhishek Banerjee said, a new group had taken shape. He called it the Cockroach Janata Party from the stage. The formal vehicle for the defectors is NCPI. Twenty Lok Sabha members moved with it. That is a large enough bloc to change whip arithmetic in the House and to trigger the anti-defection machinery. The Speaker's notice is the first formal step in that machinery. The seven-day clock is the second.

TMC is now the opposition in Bengal and a reduced force in Westminster. The student-wing rally was designed to show that the organisation still has a street. Banerjee spent part of the speech on “youth power” and on students who, he said, had forced “Delhi zamindars” to yield. The sharper half of the speech was the closed door. Kunal Ghosh had already asked the leadership not to take the defectors back. Abhishek Banerjee adopted the ask and put his own name on it, while leaving Mamata Banerjee the last word.

What the Speaker's notice can do

The Tenth Schedule lets a party seek disqualification when a legislator voluntarily gives up membership or votes against the whip. A merger of two-thirds of a legislature party is the usual defence. Whether 20 MPs meet that test for TMC's Lok Sabha group is the question Birla has put to them. If he accepts the petition, the seats fall vacant and by-elections follow. If he accepts a merger argument, the 20 stay in the House under a new flag. Either outcome will be read in Bengal as a verdict on who owns the Trinamool brand after the Assembly loss.

Banerjee also accused the state police of helping BJP workers take down party boards, and said TMC would take that fight from the High Court to the Supreme Court. That is a separate case. The sentence that will be quoted this week is the one about traitors and the closed door. It tells the 20 not to bargain for a return while their disqualification replies are being drafted.