NEW DELHI: Twenty rebel Trinamool Congress (TMC) MPs in Lok Sabha are set to merge with the Nationalist Citizens Party and would extend their support to the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), said TMC MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar on Sunday. This came after hours long meeting with the Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla in New Delhi.”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,” said rebel TMC MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar. Another rebel TMC MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay indicated that the faction would take legal route for the name TMC. This is the system. When you leave with 2/3rd of the party, you cannot demand the name of that party on the first day itself… In July, we will make a demand to give us Trinamool since we have 2/3rd majority from Trinamool. Then the court will decide,” he said. Earlier, Abhishek Banerjee wrote to Birla, urging him not to recognise any separate faction of the party. “The AITC is a single, indivisible political party. The legislative party in the Lok Sabha derives its very existence from, and remains an emanation of, the political party. There is in law only one AITC, one Leader of the Party in the House, and one Whip, all of whom hold office by authority of the political party and its competent organisational authority. 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,” he said in the letter.The merger, if approved by the Speaker, would be a major setback to the TMC, potentially reducing its strength in the Lok Sabha to just 20 MPs and reshaping the opposition’s parliamentary arithmetic. It would also mark the most significant split in the party’s parliamentary wing since Mamata Banerjee founded the Trinamool Congress in 1998.
