Trinamool’s turncoat faction on Tuesday said it would have the signatures of enough rebel MLAs in a day or two to be able to form a separate group in the Assembly and claim the “joraphool” symbol as the “real Trinamool”.

Minister Tapas Roy, himself a defector to the BJP from Trinamool, had signalled an imminent upheaval in a morning social media post.

“The situation is similar to Maharashtra, where (sic) Trinamool’s Ritabrata (Banerjee) has approached the Assembly Speaker with about 50 TMC MLAs. Khyala hobey,” Roy’s post said.

However, nothing materialised on Tuesday with Speaker Rathindra Bose away in Delhi.

In Maharashtra three years ago, the Shiv Sena’s Eknath Shinde had broken away with most of the party’s MLAs, formed a separate group in the Assembly and successfully wrested the parent party’s name and symbol. The move toppled Uddhav Thackeray’s Sena-led government, and Shinde became chief minister with
BJP support.

Rebel bloc sources said that Ritabrata — the Uluberia Purba MLA whom Trinamool expelled on Monday along with Entally MLA Sandipan Saha — was working systematically to collect the signatures of two-thirds of the party’s MLAs, required to beat the anti-defection law.

Sources in the Assembly said that with the two expulsions, Trinamool now had 78 MLAs, and the rebels therefore needed the signatures of 52 of them.

If the rebels can muster the numbers, the Speaker is expected to recognise the group as the “real” Trinamool legislature party.

With the Speaker away, an evasive Ritabrata, who spent the afternoon in the Assembly, claimed he had come for “personal work”.

“I believe in today, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow.… I can’t say,” the former CPM Rajya Sabha MP told reporters.

But a rebel faction source said: “The 50-plus rebel MLAs have been instructed to march to the Assembly together and submit their formal declaration to the Speaker, immediately before or after a strategic detour through Nabanna.”

The source would not specify a date but indications are it could be Wednesday or Thursday.

Ritabrata seemed to drop a hint, loudly demanding that all Trinamool MLAs from his home district of Howrah attend chief minister Suvendu Adhikari’s administrative review meeting on Wednesday morning.

It’s possible that the rebels would head to the Assembly from that meeting to hand in their letter and claim ownership of the party, raising the prospect of Mamata losing the jora ghas phool logo she claims to have designed herself nearly three decades ago.

The rebels will then also be in a position to claim the leader of the Opposition’s post.

Clear indications of the brewing mutiny had come as early as Sunday afternoon when barely 20 of Trinamool’s then 80 MLAs showed up at Mamata Banerjee’s home for a key meeting.

By Sunday night, the rebels had confirmed support from 30 MLAs, sources said.

Javed blow

By Monday night, the rebels’ numbers had swollen with several former ministers allegedly pledging support. Kasba MLA Javed Ahmed Khan, one of Bengal’s tallest Muslim leaders and among those least expected to abandon Mamata, seemed to be among them.

A widely circulated video purported to show Keshpur MLA Seuli Saha signing the rebel petition at the MLA Hostel on Kyd Street on Monday, apparently capping a covert mission the rebel managers had initiated three days earlier.

Javed went public on Tuesday with explosive allegations, castigating the lack of intra-party democracy.

“Where there is no democracy, there is no future,” he told ABP Ananda, alleging decisions were taken in advance and meetings were held merely as formalities where senior leaders had practically no role.

Javed claimed he had asked direct questions on at least four major issues but never received a satisfactory answer. “If a political party does not have freedom of expression and the opportunity to raise questions, the very existence of democracy is in question,” he said.

He claimed that many more party leaders were unhappy.

In a desperate counteroffensive, Mamata spent the past 48 hours selectively calling Muslim MLAs, hoping they wouldn’t follow a BJP-scripted path, some of those she had rung told this newspaper.

Veteran loyalist Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay too has been trying to convince his Trinamool colleagues that the party’s traditional minority base and Muslim MLAs would not desert it.

“What a childishly dream world Sobhanda is living in,” a frontline rebel MLA said on Tuesday evening. “He has no idea how many Muslim MLAs have already signed our document.”