Using a Nail to Pluck a Nail.
(Chapter 12)
NCPI is a fifth largest political party in the Parliament of India. It has 20 members in Lok Sabha. All this happened in less than a week.
NCPI was party whose total declared income for a full financial year was ₹1.13 lakh. The closing cash balance at the end of year was less than a dollar or seventy-five rupees. Its political performance is even more startling. Its best-performing candidate in its only contested election polled 536 votes against a NOTA tally just thirty-six short of beating it. Almost overnight, NCPI became the fifth largest party in the Lok Sabha.
MPs are turncoats and changed their loyalty but a shell political party officials honestly waited to handover the party to right candidates?
The Shell, Examined
The party’s own internal confusion is the best evidence of how empty the shell was before the merger filled it. Its founder-president, Shewly Kundu, a lawyer practicing at the Calcutta High Court, told reporters she had resigned twenty to thirty days before the merger was even announced. Asked about the terms of the merger she had supposedly authorised, she said she could not comment because she was no longer president. Asked who the new president was, she said the name could not be disclosed.
Eventually the name surfaced. It was Jyotiprakash Chatterji. No one could make a connection. It was disclosed by Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, the ex TMC MP who is now the NCPI’s actual public face. Meanwhile NCPI’s vice-president and Kundu’s husband, was in Delhi to coordinate the transition.
In 2023 NCPI’s campaign slogan was to reject political turncoats. It spent next three years existing like a registration certificate. Now it was the destination for twenty of TMC’s turncoats. The party’s own organisational secretary, Shantanu Dey, said publicly that NCPI should not be welcoming what he called TMC turncoats, and added that he would have preferred a straightforward merger with BJP, since the party had always supported the NDA in any case.
The Mechanism It Defeats
The Tenth Schedule, as originally enacted provided that one third of legislatures could change a party. The requirement of two-thirds legislatures required to merge was introduced by BJP itself. Not that it had any turncoats to contend with but the coalitions BJP join would whither away under frequent floor crossing defections. It was aimed to stop the representatives from jumping ship without electoral consequence. NCPI proved perfect bypass to the provision. And it is perfectly legal.
The question is no more whether it is a shell party or merger is legal. The question is whether using it was justified. The ground reality is that when a party sells tickets to legislators, it has already sold its own loyalty. The MLA who paid five crore for a ticket owes the party nothing beyond the repayment period. When the revenue stops, the obligation ends. Can such a party be aggrieved for turncoats?
The Tests
Chanakya’s arthshastra permitted all means to protect dharma from adharma. An opponent so debased as Nanda would justify almost every means possible for defeat.
There is a Panchatantra teaching, shathe shathyam samacharet: the cunning one is defeated only by greater cunning. A shath, someone shrewd and deceitful, can not be undone by straightforward honesty thrown against him. He is undone by a trick sharper than his own.
Mamata Banerjee’s TMC was not removed from power by NCPI. It was removed by 6.1 crore voters in a landslide on May 4. If fresh Lok Sabha elections had been called in 2026, these 20 MPs too would have lost the elections. Their merger in party opposed to TMC and Mamata, does not overturn a popular verdict.
TMC governed Bengal for fifteen years like a criminal organizationon a toll booth network worth six thousand crore a year, on relief material stolen from flood victims, on cash in school cupboards. This extreme conduct has written off the political careers of Mamata Banerjee and extortion racket of his nephew Abhishek Banerjee.
Over 15,000 women have sought justice for rape since 2021, the High Court ordered relief, and the government chose to appeal that order to the Supreme Court rather than comply with it. This was not crude criminality stumbling into view. It was a cunning operation, sophisticated, patient, dressed in the language of secularism and women’s welfare while running the opposite underneath.
Chanakya would have approved of this specific use, against this specific tyrant, with this specific six-week-old electoral mandate behind it. He would not have approved of the apparatus existing as permanent furniture in Indian democracy, available on demand to whichever side reaches it first. The shath Mamata was confident and exploring options to merge with Congress Party but the rug was pulled under her feet.
A few days ago she conducted a protest march. There were more press and media people besides youtubers than the protesters. Her nephew Abhishek now visits her under a task force of open umbrallas to prevent egg strike he had faced in sonepur.
Compare this to NCPI which subverts no one. It inconveniences sitting MPs who benefited from TMC and now choose the legal vehicle to avoid disqualification while exiting it.
By the Arthashastra’s own test, TMC had already forfeited legitimate dharmic protection through fifteen years of extraction, loot, bribe, commission, murders, and rapes.
A Caution
A year before any of this, in August 2025, this site catalogued the shell party economy of India in full satirical detail. India has over 2,600 registered parties, tax exemption under Section 13A, anonymous donations, with empty symbols standing in for empty ideologies. The entire apparatus existing as a vehicle for asset parking and political insurance rather than democratic representation.
Today the NCPI shell served to formalise the collapse of a fifteen-year extraction machine. Tomorrow it could just as easily manufacture a defection against a government that deserved to survive. The instrument does not know the difference. Only the user’s purpose does, and purposes change with the user.
NCPI was not named in that piece because nobody had heard of NCPI in August 2025. It did not need to be named. It is simply the apparatus working exactly as described, on schedule, for whoever needed it next.
But Remember that the rise in voting percentage from a mere 50% to 80+ percentage has removed the monopolies of fringe groups including the Muslim veto in Assam and West Bengal in 2026.
After the census being conducted in the country, there shall be a delimitation exercise and thereafter the Parliament will be reconsitituted after 50 years. There shall be an incremse in number of parliamentarians. The increase in number will reduce the pressure of fringe broke away groups in parliament. We can reasonably expect that this epidemic of defection from parties will pass.
The nail plucking the nail is acceptable only because the nail being removed had already been judged, by 6.1 crore voters, to be the wrong nail.
In the next chapter, we shall discuss media gossip about TMC and Congress merger.
References:
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All chapters in this series on West Bengal Assembly Elections 2026
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NCPI financial disclosures and 2023 Tripura election results: https://theprint.in/politics/behind-ncpi-the-refuge-of-tmc-rebel-mps-a-lawyer-famous-mathematician-motivational-speaker/2959882/
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Shewly Kundu resignation and internal NCPI confusion: https://m.thewire.in/article/politics/after-tmc-has-ncpi-split-over-merger-with-rebels-president-claims-she-resigned
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Jyotiprakash Chatterji named NCPI president: https://www.newsdrum.in/national/tmc-rebels-new-home-ncpi-appoints-jyotiprakash-chatterji-as-president-says-ghosh-dastidar-12044575
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NCPI leadership profile: https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/india/meet-nationalist-citizens-party-chief-inside-outfit-that-has-shaken-up-bengal-and-national-politics-2026-06-15-1044886