After months of tolerating his rabble-rousing, chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday finally suspended Trinamool Congress MLA Humayun Kabir, a BJP turncoat, from the party, drawing the line over his contentious neo-Babri Masjid pledge at Beldanga in Murshidabad.

Kabir is determined to lay the foundation stone of the mosque on December 6, to mark the day the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya was demolished in 1992.

While suspending him, Mamata called Kabir “BJP-funded... pocha dhan (rotten paddy)” on Thursday.

Kabir’s defiant, habitual indiscretion in public was fast becoming a liability for Mamata before the perform-or-perish Assembly polls.

The proverbial last straw was his refusal to budge from the promise of having a new Babri Masjid built in the Muslim-majority district. While one out of every three Bengal voters is Muslim, and Mamata does bank heavily on their support, she cannot afford to antagonise vast, non-secular sections of the Hindu majority, which the saffron camp has been going out of its way to woo, in an election that could well be won or lost with polarisation at its core this time.

No stranger to controversy, Kabir called his suspension from the party a deliberate humiliation and said he would resign as an MLA and launch a new party later this month.

He said his party would contest 135 Assembly seats (those with a substantial Muslim population) in the Assembly elections and he would expose Mamata and her party’s “double standard” on secularism.

He also went ahead and accused Mamata and her party of fooling minorities, and of a secret entente with the RSS and the BJP. Then came the unkindest cut, he swore Mamata would be an “ex” chief minister by the end of 2026 summer.

At her Behrampore rally on Thursday, shortly after her party suspended a furious Kabir, Mamata said the people of Murshidabad were peace-loving and live in communal harmony. She said that even on the fateful day of December 6, 1992, there were no incidents in the district despite a nearly 70 per cent Muslim population.

“We have been observing that day as Sanhati Diwas (harmony day) for three decades now. The people of Murshidabad do not like riots. They are against communalism...,” she said.

Referring to people like Kabir, she said: “They are doing all this with the BJP’s money before the elections. They are rotten elements. If there is one rotten paddy in a stack, it ends up rotting the rest. So it is good to remove it at once.... The people will isolate them... such blackmailing, BJP-funded traitors.”

“Never vote for Independents. Nothing is achieved by that.... The BJP had three to four such Independents planted per seat in Bihar, that ended up helping them,” Mamata said.

In a private conversation at Murshidabad on Wednesday, Mamata was quoted as saying: “If someone chooses to become a Kalidas, what can I do?”

Considered India’s greatest poet and playwright in Sanskrit, Kalidas had in an anecdote described an incident from his youth, where he had cut the very same tree branch he was sitting on, thereby falling to the ground. This anecdote has become a powerful metaphor for acting against one’s own well-being.

“I have nothing to do with it. Everyone knows what will happen to him (Kabir) if he cuts the branch he is sitting on, by his own hands,” Mamata purportedly told a gathering.

Kabir is widely accused in Bengal’s political circles of being a chronic headache for whichever party he is part of. After defecting from the Congress to Mamata’s party in 2013, he was expelled for six years in 2015, under her instructions. During the expulsion, Kabir joined the BJP for some time and was even fielded by the party from the Murshidabad Lok Sabha seat in 2019, which he lost.

After being allowed to return to Trinamool after the six-year expulsion, he won from Bharatpur in 2021 and became a vociferous backer of Mamata’s nephew and heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee. Still, he kept on embarrassing Trinamool with objectionable and often odiously communal remarks in public, and was officially reprimanded on a number of occasions in the past year.

A furious Kabir said: “The people of Murshidabad will give an answer to such an insult. On December 22, I will announce the name and programme of my party in a public meeting in Behrampore. I will field candidates for 135 Assembly seats. There will be an open fight with the BJP as well as Trinamool,” he said, before going for a recce of a proposed site for the contentious mosque.

“She (Mamata) will be ‘ex’ by the end of the (election) season,” he said.

“I will prove that the BJP and the Trinamool have an understanding. Trinamool will have to return empty-handed from Murshidabad (with 22 Assembly seats),” he added, blaming Trinamool district unit chief Apurba “David” Sarkar for conspiring against him.

David later said he knew nothing about it, and had asked Kabir to attend Mamata’s rally at Behrampore on Thursday (which the Bharatpur MLA showed up for, before being turned away), placing the responsibility of the penal action squarely on the state leadership in Calcutta.

The Congress’s Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, famously at daggers drawn with Kabir for years, said Mamata was binning him now that her work with him was done.

“Kaajeyr byalay qaji, kaaj phuroleyi paji (when needed, he is a qazi, when need is over, he is a rogue). Humayun was instigating riots here during the Lok Sabha election season last year, threatening to have a Hindu genocide in Murshidabad. Why did she not condemn him publicly then? Because he was helping her defeat me in Baharampur. Now he is of no use, she’s promptly showing him the door,” he said.

The BJP on record refused to accord any significance to the action against Kabir. BJP state unit chief Samik Bhattacharya said it was a “drama”. “He (Kabir) has been making controversial remarks for a long time, yet Trinamool never took real action... their real intention is to establish the regime of Babar in Bengal,” he claimed.