New Delhi: A day after his rebel faction of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) said it was removing Mamata Banerjee as the party’s chairperson, Ritabrata Banerjee on Tuesday (June 23) said he had approached the Election Commission (EC) to ‘apprise’ it of his camp’s decisions.“It’s a routine process. Whenever there is a special session or any session, it must be apprised to the EC and to the state body also. So that’s a normal process, we have just followed what needs to be done [sic],” Ritabrata told reporters after visiting the poll body’s top official in West Bengal on Tuesday evening.Asked if his faction was staking its claim to the TMC’s grass-and-flowers electoral symbol, the leader of opposition said: “We are the Trinamool Congress, so no question of claiming the party symbol arises.”On Monday the rebel faction held a special session aimed at seizing organisational control and said it was constituting a new national working committee wherein Howrah Madhya MLA Arup Roy would replace long-time chairperson and former chief minister Mamata as party chief.Simultaneously Mamata’s rump faction had dispatched its own working committee list to the EC in a move to assert her continued control over the TMC, which she headed from the party’s creation in 1998 until it split last month following its defeat to the BJP in the Bengal assembly elections.It also retaliated against Ritabrata’s bloc by issuing show-cause notices citing anti-party activities to key figures including Roy, Firhad Hakim, Javed Khan, Aroop Biswas, Rathin Ghosh, Sabina Yasmin, Snehasis Chakraborty and Biplab Mitra.When asked about the Mamata camp’s dispatch Monday to the poll body, Ritabrata told reporters on Tuesday that “if she has submitted then it is for the EC to decide”.Mahua Moitra, TMC MP for Krishnanagar and a leader in Mamata’s faction, said on Tuesday that the rebels’ conclave amounted to a “theatre of the absurd”.The party’s MLAs and MPs were elected on the TMC’s platform, including Mamata’s name, and the defectors ought to resign and contest fresh elections, Moitra said to presspersons, calling the party’s split led by Ritabrata an instance of “madness”.Ritabrata’s rebel faction boasts formidable numbers, with over 60 of the party’s 80 MLAs and 70 Kolkata councillors reportedly attending Monday’s special session. Tellingly, for the first time in the party’s history, the stage was entirely devoid of Mamata’s image, which stood replaced by national and cultural icons like Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul Islam.Trinamool’s Bengal unit split after its assembly election defeat when Ritabrata and another MLA, Sandipan Saha, claimed the support of 58 other party legislators for the former’s claim to leader of opposition status. They had previously alleged that Mamata’s heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee forged a number of their signatures in a bid to back the candidature of their own man, Sobhandeb Chatterjee, after which the high command expelled Ritabrata and Saha.Chatterjee approached the Calcutta high court to challenge Ritabrata’s appointment as leader of opposition but the bench declined to grant him interim relief, noting the resolution naming Chatterjee as leader of opposition is in dispute and being investigated, the numbers that Ritabrata commands as well as the fact that the latter’s expulsion is under challenge.In Delhi too the TMC faces a rebellion, with 20 of its 28 MPs, led by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, breaking away, announcing a merger with the obscure Nationalist Citizens’ Party of India and pledging support to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.