Three Lok Sabha members of the Nationalist Citizens Party of India have distanced themselves from the outfit’s alignment with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, exposing the first significant internal fault line among the 20 former Trinamool Congress MPs who moved to the Tripura-based party.
Abu Taher Khan, Khalilur Rahman and Yusuf Pathan have made clear that they do not want to be associated politically with the BJP or become part of the NDA. All three represent constituencies in West Bengal’s Muslim-majority Murshidabad district and have argued that their political positions must reflect the interests of the voters who elected them.
Their stand has complicated attempts to present the NCPI’s expanded parliamentary bloc as a cohesive NDA constituent. Khan, Rahman and Pathan skipped two successive NDA parliamentary meetings, breaking ranks with the other former Trinamool MPs who have moved closer to the governing coalition. Khan said he would not support legislation that he believed went against Muslim interests.
The dissent, however, has not stopped the three MPs from engaging with the BJP leadership or governments controlled by the party. They joined other NCPI members for a breakfast meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. Khan and Rahman also met West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari on Saturday and raised concerns involving their constituencies, including problems linked to the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.
Khan said after meeting Adhikari that cooperation with governments over constituency issues should not be interpreted as political alignment. He reiterated that he would neither join the BJP nor remain part of the NDA. The position reflects the electoral dilemma confronting the three MPs, whose constituencies contain a substantial Muslim electorate and where opposition to the BJP has traditionally been an important factor in voting behaviour.
The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool faction has seized on the dispute. Kalyan Banerjee accused the dissenting MPs of trying to confuse voters after participating in the move to the NCPI. He argued that the MPs had been elected on Trinamool tickets with anti-BJP votes and were now struggling to explain their political position to constituents.
Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, who has emerged as a leading figure among the breakaway MPs, has played down suggestions of an organisational rupture. She pointed to the group’s lengthy meeting with Modi and said Khan had participated in it despite his public rejection of an NDA association. The three MPs have also travelled with other members of the bloc for meetings with senior BJP leaders.
The dispute follows a dramatic restructuring of Trinamool after it lost power in West Bengal to the BJP following 15 years in government. Twenty of the party’s 28 Lok Sabha MPs broke away in June and declared that they had merged with the NCPI, a registered but unrecognised party founded in 2022 that had previously exercised little electoral influence.
The rebels met Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and sought recognition of the merger, arguing that their numbers represented more than two-thirds of Trinamool’s Lok Sabha strength. The constitutional dispute centres on provisions of the Tenth Schedule governing defections and mergers. Mamata Banerjee’s faction maintains that individual legislators cannot engineer the merger of their original political party merely by commanding a two-thirds majority in the legislature party.
Birla subsequently approved separate seating for the 20 MPs in the Lok Sabha, although the broader question of formal recognition of their claimed merger remained contested. The Trinamool leadership has sought disqualification of the defectors and challenged their attempt to establish themselves as a separate political force.
The parliamentary revolt accompanied an even deeper upheaval in West Bengal, where 60 of Trinamool’s 80 MLAs broke with Mamata Banerjee’s leadership and mounted a competing claim over the party organisation, name and election symbol. That dispute has placed the party’s institutional identity before the election authorities while leaving Banerjee with a sharply reduced legislative base.
(IPA Service)
