Theft of Democracy from MP to West Bengal; Reliance and Trump Jr as Business Partners; Anti ‘Cockroach’ Conspiracy Theories Make No Sense At All; Congress CM Joins Hitler Club
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Snapshot of the day
June 9, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
The theft of what remains of Indian democracy is in full flow with the Bharatiya Janata Party inducing defections from the Trinamool Congress in order to boost its numbers in the Lok Sabha and the Election Commission helping the BJP win an extra seat in the Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh by rejecting the nomination of the Congress candidate at the eleventh hour on dubious grounds.
Rather than just a replay of the BJP’s usual ‘Operation Lotus’ impulse, the rush to boost parliamentary numbers may be driven by even baser instincts on the part of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah: making a second and more decisive push to their controversial plans for delimitation and for increasing the total number of MPs in the lower house to beyond 800.
Madhya Pradesh will elect three MPs to the Rajya Sabha this week and based on the strength of the BJP and Congress in the state assembly, the former was assured two of those slots with the third going to the latter. However, the returning officer this evening rejected the nomination of the Congress’s Meenakshi Natarajan on the grounds that she had failed to list a criminal case filed against her in Hyderabad last year. Natarajan countered that the court has not even taken cognisance of the case – a private criminal complaint – but her explanation was rejected. The Congress has protested, and noted that in Jharkhand, a BJP-backed candidate, Parimal Nathwani of the Reliance group, was given time to resolve an alleged discrepancy in his nomination papers rather than being summarily turned away.
TMC leader Mamata Banerjee and Sobhandeb Chatterjee, her choice for leader of opposition in West Bengal, have moved the Calcutta high court challenging the assembly speaker’s decision appointing expelled Trinamool Congress MLA Ritabrata Chatterjee as LoP after he cobbled together support from 59 of the TMC’s 80 legislators in a mutiny against the party leadership. Banerjee and Sobhandeb are arguing that the speaker could not have appointed the expelled Ritabrata as LoP; the bench will hear the matter on the 11th. Also today, the Bengal CID turned up at Mamata’s home in connection with Ritabrata & Co’s allegations that her heir apparent and nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, had forged a number of their signatures and manufactured their support for Sobhandeb.
Ritabrata’s rebellion isn’t the only one the TMC is beset with. In Delhi, a big chunk of the party’s 29 Lok Sabha MPs met with Union minister Bhupender Yadav and are planning not only to split with their party’s leadership but also extend support to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, their erstwhile rivals. Their ringleader, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, claimed that ‘nearly 20’ of them wrote to speaker Om Birla of their decision. Dastidar, whom the TMC
