New Delhi: In an apparent bid to avoid disqualification under the anti-defection law, the rebel MPs of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Sunday (June 14) after meeting Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla announced that they will be merging with a little-known regional party named the Nationalist Citizen Party of India (NCPI).The party only formed in late 2022 and last contested three seats in the 2023 Tripura assembly elections. The TMC on the other hand with 28 MPs is the fourth-largest party in the Lok Sabha and the third-largest opposition party in the House.The rebels said they have the support of 20 of the TMC’s 28 MPs in the Lok Sabha and a claim for the TMC would be made in July, as they have the support of two-thirds of its members in the Lok Sabha.While the move may seek to avoid attracting provisions of the anti-defection law, constitutional law expert and former Lok Sabha secretary-general P.D.T. Achary writing in The Wire on Saturday had said that the understanding that two-thirds of MPs or MLAs merging with another party will not be disqualified under paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule is a wrong one, as the law provides for the merger of the original political party and not of its legislators.The rebel MPs had earlier said that they would remain as a separate faction in the Lok Sabha.However, just ahead of the rebel camp’s meeting with Birla on Sunday evening, TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, who is the party’s virtual second-in-command after former chief minister Mamata Banerjee, shot off a letter to the speaker.The letter delivered by two MPs – Sagarika Ghose and Kirti Azad – asked Birla to treat the TMC as a single indivisible party and said that no faction can carve out a parallel ‘group’ of the same party.Later, when the rebel MPs came out of the meeting with Birla – just hours after they met Union minister Bhupinder Yadav, who had been the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s election in-charge in West Bengal – they made no mention of a separate faction but instead announced that they would be merging with the little-known NCPI.“Our AITC [TMC] MPs, of whom two-thirds, that is 20 members, have submitted a letter to the Lok Sabha speaker seeking separate seating arrangements,” said rebel MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, one of the chief architects of the TMC’s parliamentary mutiny after the party’s loss in the 2026 West Bengal assembly elections.“We, the 20 members, will now merge with the Nationalist Citizen Party and work with the NDA under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah.”Rebel MP Sudip Bandopadhyay, who was earlier the leader of the TMC in the Lok Sabha, said that while the rebels will merge with the NCPI, they will make a claim for the TMC in July when parliament convenes.“We will merge with the Nationalist Citizen Party. It is a recognised regional party. This is the system. When you leave with two-thirds of the party, you cannot demand the name of that party on the first day itself. In July, when parliament will convene, we will make a demand to give us Trinamool since we have a two-thirds majority from Trinamool and will go to court. Then the court will decide,” he said.While the rebel MPs’ move to merge with an existing political party may be to avoid attracting disqualification under the anti-defection law, Achary wrote in The Wire that the understanding that if two-thirds of a party’s MPs or MLAs merge with another party they will not be disqualified under paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule is wrong.“This para can exempt an MP or MLA only if their original party merges with another party and two-thirds of the MPs or MLAs agree with the merger and become members of the other party. It must be understood that the merger is of the original political party and not of MPs or MLAs,” he wrote.Achary wrote that both in Dr. Mahachandra Prasad Singh vs Chairman, Bihar Legislative Council (2004) and Subhash Desai vs Principle Secretary, government of Maharashtra (2023), the Supreme Court made it clear that for getting exemption from disqualification under paragraph 4, there has to be a merger of the original political party with another party.“If some MPs or MLAs go and join another party it is no merger, it is defection plain and simple,” Achary said.In an attempt to pre-empt the rebel group’s move to carve out a separate faction, Abhishek too had referred to the Supreme Court’s 2023 judgment and in his letter to Birla asked that the TMC be treated as “a single political party represented in the House solely through its duly authorised leader and whip, and decline to accord any recognition, status or facility to any purported separate group or faction of the AITC”.In the letter Banerjee wrote that while “certain members of the Lok Sabha belonging to the AITC have submitted, or propose to submit, a communication to your good office seeking to be recognised as a separate group or faction of the AITC, independent of the legislative party”, the TMC is a single indivisible party.“The AITC is a single, indivisible political party. The legislative party in the Lok Sabha derives its very existence from, and remains an emanation of, the political party. There is in law only one AITC, one leader of the party in the House and one whip, all of whom hold office by authority of the political party and its competent organisational authority,” the letter seen by The Wire said.“No member or set of members can, by their own volition, carve out a parallel ‘group’ or ‘faction’ of the same party and claim independent recognition within the House.”The letter cited a 2023 judgment of a constitution bench of the Supreme Court and provisions of the Tenth Schedule, and said the law does not recognise the “splintering of a political party into competing groups”.Achary too had written in The Wire that there is “no legal provision which empowers the speaker to treat a group of dissident MPs as a separate block or group”.