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Kolkata: Ritabrata Banerjee, a newly elected MLA, has laid claim to the legislative identity of the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC).

On June 3, a letter was presented to West Bengal Assembly Speaker Rathindra Bose, proposing Banerjee as the Leader of Opposition, defying an earlier official communication by the party. The letter bears the signatures of 59 TMC MLAs, more than the two-thirds needed for legislative identity.

Should this takeover succeed, it will go down as one of the most significant power grabs in Bengal’s political history.

Chronology of the rebellion

The first visible crack came almost immediately after the election. Ritabrata Banerjee’s relationship with the TMC high command began to deteriorate when he publicly questioned Jehangir Khan’s sudden withdrawal from the Falta re-poll. 

A day after the re-poll, a video surfaced showing him, exchanging warm pleasantries with Suvendu Adhikari, the newly installed BJP chief minister, at Banga Bhaban in New Delhi. Banerjee defended the exchange as routine political courtesy. He claimed he did not believe in the politics of ignoring or insulting opponents in public. When he again met Adhikari it could not really be called a convenient coincidence.

That moment created the atmosphere of suspicion in which the later rebellion exploded. 

The immediate trigger was the Leader of the Opposition controversy. After the election, Mamata Banerjee convened a meeting of the 80 newly elected TMC MLAs at her Kalighat residence. There, the name of veteran leader Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay was proposed for the post of Leader of the Opposition. But what should have been a routine legislative decision soon turned into an administrative, legal and political scandal.

The Assembly Speaker reportedly demanded proper minutes of the meeting and verifiable signatures of the MLAs supporting Chattopadhyay. This was where the crisis deepened. After the MLAs were sworn in and their signatures entered in the Assembly records, the TMC leadership attempted to gather formal signatures for the LoP resolution. But attendance had already begun to fall. 

A letter was submitted to the Speaker’s office carrying around 70 purported signatures in support of Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay. But when the Assembly Secretariat compared those signatures with the official records, serious discrepancies were reportedly detected. Some signatures allegedly did not match the oath-time signatures. Some were written in block letters. What began as a procedural step now looked like something far more damaging.

Ritabrata Banerjee and Sandipan Saha, two newly elected MLAs, complained to the Speaker that they had never consented to Chattopadhyay’s........

© The Wire