After losing her chief ministerial crown, Mamata Banerjee is now in danger of being deprived of the reins of the Trinamool Congress, a party she founded. On Wednesday, at least 58 of the TMC’S 80 legislators broke ranks with Ms Banerjee and laid claim to the mantle of the dominant legislature wing of the party. The rebel faction, seemingly led by Ritabrata Banerjee, recently expelled from the TMC, has the numerical threshold so as not to fall foul of the anti-defection law. The cat had been set among the pigeons, so to speak, earlier when Mr Banerjee and Sandipan Saha, among those to change allegiance, alleged that the signatures of legislators on a letter proposing the name of a TMC veteran as leader of the Opposition had been forged. The orchestrated drama — the higher-ups in Delhi are believed to be pulling the strings — then followed a tell-tale script. The Speaker, back from a trip to Delhi that included meetings with the prime minister and the Lok Sabha Speaker, quickly granted recognition to the dissenting faction. There are whispers that the undivided TMC’s parliamentary representation may dwindle soon.
Understandably, the developments are being compared to the crafty mechanism that led to the split in and, subsequently, the fall of the Shiv Sena-led government in Maharashtra: the TMC, though, had already been voted out. Constitutional queries have risen too — pertaining to the Bengal Speaker exceeding his brief. There is also that other, increasingly impotent, matter of defectors defying — defiling — their electoral mandates. These issues would undoubtedly proceed to the courts. The larger inferences are perhaps two-fold. Regional, dynastic and personality-driven outfits — the TMC, just like the Shiv Sena earlier, bears proof — are increasingly becoming vulnerable to implosions from within. This vulnerability is undoubtedly related to a deeper crisis. India has entered the post-moral/ideological phase in its evolution as a polity wherein partymen are no longer sheepish about bartering their ideological fidelity for crumbs of power. On many occasions, such a switch is existential — many such shifty legislators are tainted by corruption. The weaponisation of procedures to split rival parties, neuter their legislative core and, in the process, make them irrelevant may appear to be a stroke of Machiavellian ingenuity. But what it ushers in is institutionalised hegemony. Is that why India is slipping on the index of democracy?