Where exactly is the office of the NCPI, the Nationalist Citizens Party of India?

The question seemed to stump Arbaz Khan and Anil Naskar, friends and Toto drivers born and brought up barely 100 metres from the headquarters of what is suddenly poised to become Bengal’s largest political party in terms of the number of MPs.

“What is NCPI? Do you mean a party? There’s no party office here,” Arbaz said.

The friends seemed unaware that the NCPI had on Sunday evening been suddenly catapulted from obscurity to national limelight with 20 rebel Trinamool MPs seeking a “merger” with it, apparently to escape the axe of the anti-defection law.

“Do you want to go to the Jago Biswa NGO, like some TV reporters did? It’s just a few metres away,” Arbaz said.

The two-storey green-and-saffron building in Hatgacha village, Jhorehat gram panchayat, Sankrail — official headquarters of the NCPI that was registered with the Election Commission in January 2023 — is barely 18km from Calcutta, down a narrow diversion off Andul Road.

The building houses an NGO, a Bengali weekly newspaper Jago Biswa, and an association of unorganised women workers, going by the names painted on its walls.

A flex banner announcing the existence of the NCPI, its address and contact numbers hung from the first floor.

The building, which appeared deserted, seemed a residential house with a small frontyard garden. A red Hyundai carrying a press sticker was parked inside.

The house apparently belongs to Shewly Kundu and Uttiyo Kundu, wife and husband, whom three-year-old social media posts by the party described as its president and vice-president.

(Shewly, a Calcutta High Court lawyer, told reporters on Monday she had recently resigned as the party’s founder-president.)

Multiple shouts of “Is anyone there” brought no response. A group of central force and Sankrail police personnel stationed outside the house chatted among themselves. A policeman said they had been told on Sunday night to guard the house.

Nearly an hour’s wait later, Sujata Dey, who identified herself as the family cook, stepped out of the house but refused to talk about the party or its leaders.

Candidates backed by the NCPI had unsuccessfully contested 11 seats across three Howrah gram panchayats in 2023, and fought and lost from three seats in the Tripura Assembly elections the same year. It has no MLAs or MPs and lacks recognised-party status.

Neighbourhood residents were surprised to learn that the 20 Trinamool rebels were about to join a party headquartered just yards from their homes.

“We all knew it as an NGO working for the education of orphaned children. Today, reporters told us it was also the office of a political party,” said a bemused Chandana Soren.

Not everyone in the NCPI — one of whose Tripura election posters asked people to “shun turncoats” — seemed happy with the idea of sheltering the Trinamool defectors.

Shantanu Dey, the party’s national organising secretary whom The Telegraph was able to contact in the evening, said he and several other founding members had learnt about the move to induct the Trinamool rebels only from media reports.

“I called Uttiyo Kundu but he did not answer my calls. We shall soon hold a meeting with other founding members and announce our decision,” Dey said over the phone.

“We have not so far been officially informed about the induction of 20 Trinamool MPs.”

He added: “We formed the party to work for the people. If these MPs genuinely want to work for the people in keeping with our party constitution, they are welcome.”

The questions occupying many in Bengal’s political circles are why the party was formed, whether it is a “shell political party”, and what purpose it had served by contesting Assembly elections in Tripura and gram panchayat polls in Bengal.

Dey insisted that the party had been established as a political alternative with a proper constitution and organisational structure, but local people claimed it had contested the 2023 panchayat elections to help Trinamool.

Mintu Bera, a barber with an outlet near Andul railway station, was one of the 11 unsuccessful NCPI-backed candidates in the 2023 panchayat elections.

“I was a BJP worker and they (NCPI leaders) asked me to contest the election, promising that a local football ground would be repaired,” Bera said. “After the election, I realised we had been fielded to split the BJP votes.”

Bera welcomed the induction of the 20 Trinamool MPs, claiming to have known about it three to four days in advance.

“Someone from the NCPI informed me,” he said, adding that he was back being a BJP worker and would not join the NCPI again.

Political scientist Biswanath Chakraborty said: “It is unprecedented in Bengal’s political history for 20 MPs from a recognised political party to join what many would describe as a ‘shell party’ that is not recognised by the Election Commission.”

Uttiyo’s phone remained switched off till late Monday evening.

On Sunday night, the party had opened a new social media page, claiming through graphics that it had the highest number of MPs from Bengal — 20 — higher than the BJP’s 12 and Trinamool’s purported residual strength of 8.

Till late Monday evening, though, no official communication had come from the Lok Sabha secretariat recognising the merger sought by the Trinamool rebels.

The NCPI also posted a video of the security deployment at the Sankrail office on its Facebook page.

Dey told this newspaper that apart from its Howrah headquarters, the party also maintains an office in Tripura. In the 2023 Tripura elections, the party’s three candidates had together polled about 1,000 votes, some of them finishing below NOTA.