New Delhi: Amid the disintegration of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) with MLAs and MPs deserting former Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, rebel Lok Sabha MP Satabdi Roy on June 12 dismissed the role played by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The four-term Lok Sabha MP from West Bengal’s Birbhum, who is being seen as one of the principle architects of the TMC’s parliamentary rebellion said that it is not important what the BJP did, and questioned why the TMC could not retain so many of its leaders after the 2026 assembly election defeat as dozens of MLAs and MPs deserted it.“When a third person becomes involved between a husband and a wife, the society blames the third person. But how much is that person at fault? There must have been a vacuum between the two, which allowed a third person to come in,” Roy said in a telephonic interview with The Wire. “What the BJP did is not important, what the party (TMC) did is important. Why couldn’t the party retain so many people?”Roy’s statement comes as a list of MPs seen by The Wire emerged on Friday who have written to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla seeking to be a separate faction of the TMC. Apart from Roy who served as the deputy leader of the TMC in the house, the signatories on the list include: Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar,Bapi Haldar,Sharmila Sarkar,Prasun Banerjee,Jagadish Basunia,Asit Kumar Mal,Arup Chakraborty,Kalipada Soren,Deepak Adhikari (Dev),June Maliah,Partha Bhowmick,Khalilur Rahman,Abu Taher Khan,Yusuf Pathan,Mitali Bag,Mala Roy, andSaayoni Ghosh.On June 9, as former chief minister and TMC supremo Banerjee attended the opposition INDIA bloc meeting in Delhi’s Constitution Club, party sources said to The Wire that at least 10 of these MPs met at the residence of Union minister Bhupender Yadav who was the BJP’s election in-charge for West Bengal. The group seeks to be recognised as a separate legislative bloc aligned with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). ‘Corruption, over-confidence, imposing I-PAC on the party leaders and workers’The rebellion in parliament has been preceded by a similar internal mutiny in the assembly, which came to the fore over the choice of the leader of opposition, where a rebel faction led by Ritabrata Banerjee now has the support of 58 to 60 MLAs, surpassing the threshold required to bypass the anti-defection law.Roy’s Lok Sabha party colleague Kirti Azad on Friday alleged that the defections in the party were orchestrated by the BJP, and that he too had received calls from the saffron party but said that he would not succumb to their “nasty tricks”Roy however, said that the decision to leave the TMC was not under the BJP’s pressure.“It may be that what he is saying is true for him. But in my case I decided after that point (following the elections) and then we spoke amongst ourselves and decided amongst ourselves,” she said.Roy said that the decision to leave the party was taken after the assembly election defeat in which the BJP swept the state and the TMC was reduced to 80 seats, failing to form the government for a fourth successive term.“After such a huge electoral loss, the party did not want to change itself, or analyse why it lost – corruption, over-confidence, imposing I-PAC on the party leaders and workers even though our leaders and workers are the ones who have been making the party win for all these years,” she said. “I thought that if the party does not look for the reasons why it lost, then it will lose in the future as well because if we don’t rectify those mistakes we will make them again. That is why I thought the party will not change itself, and will continue to make the same mistakes again which is why I decided that there is no point in staying in the party anymore.”‘No response was forthcoming’When asked if Roy had raised the issues ailing the party with Banerjee herself, Roy said that she had been with the party since 2009, before it first formed the government in West Bengal in 2011.“I have been with the party even before the party was in the government,” she said. “Several attempts have been made to speak on several issues, suggestions, discussions. But despite this it was felt that no response was forthcoming or it was not resulting in anything.”With 28 seats in the Lok Sabha, the rebel MPs need at least 18 names to cross the two-thirds mark that provides them protection under the anti-defection law. Separately Rajya Sabha MPs Sushmita Dev, Sukhendu Sekhar Ray and Prakash Chik Baraik have also resigned this week.The Wire has earlier reported that Roy had signalled discontent as early as 2020-21 when she was on the verge of defecting to the BJP but the TMC leadership intervened to placate and retain her as regional strongman Anubrata Mondal was already facing severe central agency pressure.Roy, who had remained a strong voice against the BJP including in its moves to push back Bengali speaking migrant workers to Bangladesh in recent months, said that they would take a call on providing issue based support to the BJP but denied joining the party.“Changes will have to be made. No party or politician or even an individual can stay the same. Someone who you may idolise as a hero, years later you may not find them to be so. At 15 years of age a book that you found thrilling you may not find so at 25. People and reasons both change with time. In time I will see whether the issues that I had objections to, whether I will support them or not,” she said.“We will remain as a separate bloc, and give issue-based support to the government. We are not joining the BJP but staying as a separate bloc.”