Daijiworld Media Network – New Delhi
New Delhi, Jun 15: Around 20 rebel MPs of the Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, are set to merge with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI), a little-known political outfit from Tripura that secured just 822 votes in the 2023 Assembly elections.
The NCPI, founded in 2022, is a registered but unrecognised political party. It contested two seats in the 2023 Tripura Assembly elections and secured only 0.03 per cent of the total votes polled in those constituencies.
The development comes as the rebel MPs seek a new political identity after breaking ranks with the Trinamool Congress. The NCPI did not contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
In the 2023 Tripura Assembly polls, NCPI candidate Barheda Tripura secured 536 votes from the Chawmanu constituency, while Jehangir Ali received 286 votes from Kailashahar before later joining the Congress.
By comparison, the All India Trinamool Congress, which had expanded its activities into Tripura as part of its national outreach strategy, contested 28 seats and secured 22,316 votes, accounting for 0.88 per cent of the vote share.
The proposed merger has drawn criticism from several opposition leaders. Senior advocate and Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal questioned the legality of the move, arguing that individual legislators cannot merge with another political party without the parent party itself deciding to do so.
“TMC rebels will merge with Nationalist Citizens Party. Indian democracy has become the theatre of the absurd. A joke. The rebels of the TMC legislative party cannot merge with a political party; that can happen only if the TMC wishes to do so. Disqualify them,” Sibal wrote on social media platform X.
Meanwhile, TMC National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee has written to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, citing constitutional and legal provisions to argue that there is no mechanism for the rebel MPs to function as a separate bloc in Parliament.
Banerjee urged the Speaker to continue recognising the Trinamool Congress as a single parliamentary party and to hear its submissions before taking any decision on the status of the rebel lawmakers.
The issue is expected to trigger a legal and procedural debate over anti-defection provisions and the recognition of parliamentary groups in the coming days.