A day after his wife and two sons were summoned for questioning by the central agency Enforcement Directorate in a corruption-linked case, Trinamool Congress MLA Madan Mitra on Wednesday shifted allegiance from Mamata Banerjee’s camp to the rebel faction led by Ritabrata Banerjee. He said he had “only changed my room in assembly”.
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He said he wanted Mamata’s nephew and the party’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee — who has been blamed by many rebels for the TMC split — to “step aside for six months” but quit when that demand was not accepted.
“I told ]Abhishek], let us build the party, and then you can come back and take your seat, but he refused. He said, ‘I won’t leave the party.’ The party is sinking; the boat has gone under. People are dying. Yet, the party decided or rather it was forced to accept that everyone else could die, but Abhishek had to be saved. It is deeply saddening,” Mitra said at a press conference, seated next to Ritabrata, who has most of the 80 TMC MLAs with him and is the Leader of Opposition in the assembly at present.
The split in Mamata’s party has only grown since the BJP unseated her and the TMC regime after 15 years in the elections results in May.
