It's reached its zenith :::: Poetic Justice and Tables turned :::: "Khela Shesh" for drama queen and 'mercurial aapa' - for whom corruption and Mia-appeasement have hit the Nail in the coffin

Reportedly 50-plus rebel MLAs have been instructed to march to the Assembly together and submit formal declaration to the Speaker !! 

TMC - stage set for split. Pishi about to lose TMC's official symbol  

"Khela Shesh" for drama queen and 'mercurial aapa' - for whom corruption and Mia-appeasement have hit the Nail in the coffin !! 

It's reached its zenith :::: Poetic Justice and Tables turned 

Mamata Banerjee's onetime advisor and perhaps even now .. include a quiz master-turned-Mr Know All. He is not a Bengali and but he had extra constitutional power to speak 'bigger' than he should have. Last time he said for each seat win in Kolkata city; one Trinamool MP will shave his head. 

His time came and gone !! And his quizzing memories seem to fail. Now the real polity of 2026 June.  

Rebel bloc sources said that Ritabrata Banerjee — the Uluberia Purba MLA whom Trinamool expelled on Monday along with Entally MLA Sandipan Saha — was working systematically to collect the signatures of two-thirds of the party’s MLAs, required to beat the anti-defection law.

With two expulsions, Trinamool Congress now has 78 MLAs, and the rebels therefore would need the signatures of 52 of them.

If the rebels can muster the numbers, the Speaker is expected to recognise the group as the “real” Trinamool legislature party.

Ritabrata : Working with passion of a former communist 

Trinamool’s 'turncoat faction' on Tuesday said it would have the signatures of enough rebel MLAs in a day or two to be able to form a separate group in the Assembly and claim the “jora phool” (twin flowers) symbol as the “real Trinamool”.

Minister Tapas Roy, himself a defector to the BJP from Trinamool, has also signalled an imminent upheaval in his former party. 

For reference, we may recall Abhishek Banerjee before elections had threatened to make Tapas Roy sell fish in Maniktala market.  

"I am older than his aunt and came to politics even before her ... that was the level of arrogance," he has said in later days. 

“The situation is similar to Maharashtra, where (sic) Trinamool’s Ritabrata (Banerjee) has approached the Assembly Speaker with about 50 TMC MLAs. Khyala hobey,” Roy has said.

However, nothing materialised on Tuesday with Speaker Rathindra Bose away in Delhi.

In 2022, Maharashtra witnessd similar games vis-a-vis Shiv Sena and NCP.

The Shiv Sena’s Eknath Shinde had broken away with most of the party’s MLAs, formed a separate group in the Assembly and successfully wrested the parent party’s name and symbol. 

The move toppled Uddhav Thackeray’s Sena-led government, and Shinde became chief minister with the BJP support.

On June 2, Mamata Banerjee faced reality. Something she had experienced in Delhi's Ram Lilla ground in 2014. 

But this time in Kolkata -- where her associates dreamt of turning the metropolis into a Dhaka (suggesting Islamic takeover).

At Mamata rally, police curbs, no star power & desertion unknown to aapa !! and fufu (aunt) 

Conspicuously absent were the overwhelming majority of her MLAs, and the who’s who of the entertainment-culture scene  

As Mamata Banerjee took the megaphone under a bus-stop shed at the Esplanade Y-Channel on Tuesday afternoon, barely 500 people, many of them journalists and police, were around to listen to her.

This was just about 300 metres from the spot where, exactly 316 days ago on July 21 last year, she had addressed an ocean of humanity outside Victoria House, confident and at the pinnacle of her power -- says 'The Telegraph' newspaper - which was notoriously part of the fish-fry journalism party !!  

The distance was negligible; the displacement total, the report ran rather acidly.

Through her nearly five decades in public life, Mamata has commanded crowds in Bengal through the sheer force of her personality. 

Even at her lowest point before the May 4 drubbing — in 2004, when she was left her party’s lone Lok Sabha MP — her loyalists would choke Calcutta’s streets at one signal from her.  

On Tuesday, the new reality hit her first in the form of the Kolkata Police — her minions till four weeks ago — flatly refusing her plea for permission to gather at Rani Rashmoni Avenue.

She could hold a rally in the adjacent Y-Channel, only from 2pm to 5pm, and without microphones or a stage, the police said. What followed was a claustrophobic scramble under the bus-stop’s metal shed, with an iron bench for hardly seven to eight people as the lone seating place.

A single car brought Mamata to the venue around 2.15pm, threading its way between police guardrails along the tramlines near Esplanade’s 184-year-old Tipu Sultan Shahi Masjid.

Chaos ensued, marked by frantic pushing and shoving among the video journalists, news photographers and a few hundred selfie-seeking onlookers.

At its peak, the gathering barely touched 700 people, a number that quietly thinned below 500 within 90 minutes. Aside from two local processions, of about 50 people each, joining in, the vast asphalt expanses looked largely bare.

Surrounded by a rapidly shrinking cohort of her old guard — represented by loyalists like Dola Sen, Madan Mitra, Nayna Bandyopadhyay, Kalyan Banerjee and Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay — the 71-year-old spent the afternoon struggling to stay relevant, the report in the newspaper said. 

Conspicuously absent were the overwhelming majority of her MLAs, and the who’s who of the entertainment-culture scene that used to be a constant feature at her rallies till the other day. 

Sources said only 14 of Trinamool's 120 MLAs and MPs were present. Clutching the megaphone, Mamata delivered a stop-and-start speech, between bouts of sloganeering, over a period of about half an hour. 

Khela Shesh ! - poetic justice for a self-important former autocrat !!

Mess and Messy days ahead. 

ends