Mamata loses two-thirds of Lok Sabha team
At last, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) collapsed officially on Sunday evening, after Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla approved the proposal of 20 rebel MPs to join a new party – Nationalist Citizenship Party. All 20 MPs led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Sudip Bandopadhyay, first met the BJP’s West Bengal election in-charge and Union Minister Bhupender Yadav. They later submitted their application to join a literally unknown party, the Nationalist Citizenship Party.
TMC had 28 MPs in the Lok Sabha and 13 MPs in the Rajya Sabha. In the Rajya Sabha, four MPs resigned from the party. The rebel TMC MPs said that they will first join the new party and become part of BJP led of NDA and support Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Coming out of Speaker’s home, Sudip Bandopadhyay said: “We have joined the Nationalist Citizens’ Party. This is a political party. It is a recognised regional party. We have merged with it… It will be decided in the court which one of the real TMC is.”
The leader of the rebel MPs, Kakoli Ghosh, said: “We, the twenty MPs elected from the AITC, met the Speaker and submitted a letter requesting to sit separately; these twenty MPs constitute more than two-thirds of our total strength. We are merging with the Nationalist Citizens Party. Moving forward, we will work for the nation and collaborate with the NDA under the leadership of the Prime Minister.”
“We requested separate seating arrangements. We’ve said that we are merging with the Nationalist Citizens Party.” She added.
“Two-thirds of the MPs of TMC have given a letter to the Speaker for a separate seating arrangement. We will merge with the Nationalist Citizens Party and support the NDA,” she said. Senior TMC leader and Lok Sabha MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay said the dissident camp had already merged with the Nationalist Citizens Party, which he described as a regional party.
The Nationalist Citizens Party is a lesser-known registered, unrecognised party from Tripura. Asked about the competing claim of the Mamata Banerjee-led faction, Bandopadhyay said the issue of who constitutes the “real TMC” would be decided by the courts, and added that they would claim the party’s electoral symbol of two flowers. “The court will decide later who is the real TMC. We met the Speaker and gave him our request,” he said.
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