Twenty rebel members of West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress met Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla in New Delhi on Sunday and said they wanted to sit as a separate bloc in the lower house of India’s Parliament. But after being given to understand that they could not sit under the Trinamool or a new Trinamool name, the 20 rebel lawmakers joined a new and little-known regional party. The party is called the Nationalist Citizens’ Party of India, or NCPI.
The defection of these 20 Trinamool Congress lawmakers to the obscure party has, in effect, split the party.
The NCPI was first founded by Aniket De and Shiuli Kundu. They set it up from Howrah Sakrail. It was initially built as a non-governmental organization (NGO). The NGO was later converted into a political party.
The party’s leaders are Uttiya Kundu and Shiuli Kundu. India’s Election Commission recognized it as a political party on Jan. 20, 2022.
The party fielded seven candidates in the 2023 Tripura assembly election. Its party symbol is the pen. None of the seven candidates won that election. Far from winning, they polled only a handful of votes. Of the seven, the highest number of votes went to Jahangir Ali, the candidate for the Kaila assembly seat. He received 286 votes.
The rebel Trinamool Congress members of the Lok Sabha submitted an application to Speaker Om Birla seeking permission to sit separately. June 14, 2026, New Delhi
In the end, to navigate various legal angles and avoid risk, the Trinamool rebels gave up their identity in the NCPI. They merged with the NCPI. And with 20 lawmakers in the Lok Sabha, an obscure political party has now emerged as the country’s fifth-largest political party.
The Trinamool Congress suffered a heavy defeat in the recent West Bengal assembly election. Of the 294 seats in the state assembly, Trinamool won 80. The Hindutva BJP, on the other hand, won more than 200 seats. The state’s new chief minister is the hardline Hindutva leader Suvendu Adhikari.
After Trinamool’s collapse in the assembly, unrest broke out within the party. Most legislators and lawmakers blamed party chief Mamata Banerjee and all-India general secretary Abhishek Banerjee for the defeat. Many in the party also face widespread allegations of corruption.
The party’s general secretary, Abhishek Banerjee, proposed the name of legislator Shobhandeb Chattopadhyay as leader of the opposition in the state assembly. In Abhishek’s letter to the speaker, an application was made bearing the signatures of 70 of the 80 legislators. But from the rebel camp, legislator Ritabrata Banerjee was proposed as the assembly’s leader of the opposition. At the same time, the rebel candidates alleged that many signatures on Abhishek’s application to the speaker, said to carry 70 signatures, had been forged.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report