Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Wednesday invited Trinamool’s House leader Abhishek Banerjee for a meeting at 5pm on Friday to present his case on the split in the party, sources said.
On Monday, Trinamool MP Kirti Azad had met Birla and told him that the Speaker’s office had let him down as Abhshek had been sent an email at 2pm asking him to meet the Speaker at 4pm. The mail was sent at a time when the Enforcement Directorate was questioning Abhishek in Calcutta in a teacher recruitment scam case.
Asked if Abhishek would attend Friday’s meeting, a Trinamool MP said: “He has received the email only at 5pm…. He has already said that he will meet the Speaker.”
The Speaker has met a few Trinamool rebels led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar. He intends to meet Abhishek before seeking legal opinion on the application of the rebels to “merge” with the little-known Nationalist Citizens Party of India — a move seen as a way to get around anti-defection provisions to retain Parliament membership.
The BJP is believed to have engineered the split to shore up support for the passage of three bills, including a constitutional amendment, to operationalise the women’s reservation law passed in 2023, undertake delimitation and implement it before the 2029 Lok Sabha polls.
On June 10, Abhishek wrote to Birla arguing that any such merger would be unconstitutional. He explained: “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.
“This position is squarely settled by the judgment of the Constitution Bench of the Hon’ble Supreme Court in Subhash Desai v. Principal Secretary, Governor of Maharashtra & Ors., 2023… authored for the Bench presided over by the Hon’ble Chief Justice of India.”
Abhishek interpreted the judgment as follows: “(a) The defence of a ‘split’ stands abrogated…. (b) The political party — not the legislature party — is supreme…. The Speaker recognises the political party, not rival factions.”
He added: “The combined effect of the above is that the relief reportedly sought — recognition as a separate group or faction of the AITC — is unknown to law and impermissible. After the Ninety-first Amendment, the only lawful route by which a body of members may lawfully realign is a merger within the meaning of Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule, when two conditions are satisfied — namely when the political party merges and, cumulatively, two-thirds of the legislature party switches….
“Therefore, assuming without admitting in any manner that two-thirds of the legislative party has switched, there has been no merger of the political party with any party or any creation of a new party called AITC.”