The Party That Lost in Tripura in 2023 Is Now the Fifth Largest in India's Lok Sabha
Jun 15, 2026
Agartala, Jun 15: The story of the Nationalist Citizens Party of India has two cities and three years between them. It began in Howrah, West Bengal, where the party registered itself with the Election Commission in 2022, rooted in a social welfare organisation that believed every Indian deserved seven basic rights: housing, employment, food, health, clothing, education and legal protection. It then crossed into Tripura, the only state where it ever stood for election, in February 2023, putting up four candidates across Chawmanu, Ambassa, Kailashahar and Karamchara constituencies. Four candidates, four losses, and roughly 800 combined votes later, the party returned to silence. Most political observers in Tripura said this week they had never heard of it.
Then came June 14, 2026. On that Sunday, roughly 20 rebel Trinamool Congress MPs, led by veteran parliamentarian Sudip Bandyopadhyay and Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, walked into Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla's chamber and formally announced their merger with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India. Overnight, a party whose entire electoral history lived inside Tripura's assembly records became the fifth-largest group in India's Parliament and the second-largest constituent of the National Democratic Alliance, surpassing the Telugu Desam Party's 16-seat count.
The party's registered headquarters sits in Sankrail, Howrah, where its president Shewly Kundu and vice president Uttiyo Kundu had quietly held the organisation together. In Tripura, the party never had a president at all, only a convener in the form of National Organising Secretary Shantanu Dey.
Meanwhile, the rebel MPs chose NCPI precisely because of its legal convenience. India's anti-defection law protects parliamentarians from disqualification only if two-thirds of a party's members formally merge with an existing registered party, not if they merely form a new group. NCPI, with its clean registration and minimal internal hierarchy, offered the rebels both legal protection and complete operational freedom. Tripura did not give NCPI a victory in 2023. It gave it something that proved far more useful: a place in the electoral record, and three years of quiet existence before the country finally came looking.
