New Delhi : It was supposed to be a routine exercise. Every year, Parliament reconstitutes its department-related standing committees. A few chairpersons stay on, a few make way, and the political class transitions to the next fight.
This year, the bulletins that came out of the two secretariats on October 3, putting the new committees in place from September 26, carried a sting. The Trinamool Congress (TMC) felt it first because what hurt was what was missing. For two years running, the party had chaired two standing committees. On the new list of 24 chairpersons, it chairs none.
Dola Sen is out as chairperson of the parliamentary standing committee on commerce. The chair goes to the BJP’s Sudhanshu Trivedi. Kirti Azad is no longer to head the standing committee on chemicals and fertilisers. That one went to Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar.
It is the second name (Ghosh Dastidar) that turned the standing committee reshuffle into a story. To understand why, one must turn to the events of May. The TMC lost the West Bengal assembly elections to the BJP. Within weeks, the TMC parliamentary party began to come apart.
On May 27, Ghosh Dastidar resigned from every post she held in the party. On June 14, after a meeting with Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla at his residence, she announced that 20 of the TMC’s 28 Lok Sabha MPs—more than two-thirds of its strength—were merging with a little-known outfit, the Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI), and would support the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
The NCPI had contested exactly one election before this: Tripura in 2023. The TMC rebels asked to sit separately in the Lok Sabha. Speaker Birla allotted them separate seats for the monsoon session of Parliament.
TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee filed disqualification petitions against all 20 MPs under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution. He wrote to Birla on July 27, met him on August 12 and then went to the Supreme Court to seek a time-bound decision. On August 25, a bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant issued notices to the 20 MPs.
The Lok Sabha speaker, for his part, sent out his own notices and gave the TMC rebels time to reply. Sudip Bandyopadhyay, once the TMC’s floor leader in the Lok Sabha and now one of the 20 MPs branching out, was given time until September 22.
Four days after that deadline, the standing committees were reconstituted. The leader of the rebellion, Ghosh Dastidar, was in the chair of a committee the TMC had held since 2024. So, while the party was trying to get her thrown out of the House, she was handed a committee of it.
This is not the kind of development Mamata Banerjee can shrug off. It cuts to the party’s most basic claim on its MPs. Mamata wrote to Birla, whose response made two points. First, the disqualification petition against Ghosh Dastidar is pending. Second, the Digital Sansad website still lists all 28 MPs as belonging to the TMC. Whether Ghosh Dastidar is an NCPI member at all is the question Birla has yet to answer.
The TMC had asked in writing to keep one Lok Sabha committee and had nominated its sitting chairperson to continue. The appointment, Birla said, ignored both the objection and the nomination. The TMC’s Derek O’Brien took up the commerce standing committee loss in the Rajya Sabha, where the TMC is the third-largest party and where Dola Sen had run the panel for two years.
The objections were noted but nothing moved. Now, a look at how it was all done. The government did not have to take both committees away from the TMC. It took one for itself (standing committee on commerce). The other it let go to a politician the TMC cannot disown or control. Either way, the party is out of the room. But in the second case (chemicals and fertilisers), it is out of the room because of its own rebellion, and every meeting Ghosh Dastidar now chairs will says so.
The BJP’s own gains in all of this are easier to read. The standing committee on commerce is the big one. The committee’s brief is no longer about one ministry. Tariffs, trade talks, exports, supply chains and free-trade agreements have become questions of national strategy, and India’s dealings with the United States, Europe and China pass through all of them. This is where the government expects the toughest questions over the next year. And it now has one of its own in the chair.
In other standing committees, Sudheer Gupta replaced C.M. Ramesh as chairperson of the panel on railways. Shashank Mani heads the panel on labour, textiles and skill development. Sujeet Kumar takes over personnel, public grievances, law and justice from Brij Lal.
The old guard stays. Radha Mohan Singh continues at defence, which he has chaired since 2024. Bhartruhari Mahtab keeps finance and Radha Mohan Das Agrawal home affairs. Nishikant Dubey stays with communications and IT. Anurag Thakur stays with coal, mines and steel while Rajiv Pratap Rudy keeps water resources.
Put the standing committee names in a row and the shape is obvious. Finance, home, defence, commerce, IT, railways, coal and steel. The committees that sit over the government’s most important economic, security and infrastructure business are chaired by the ruling BJP.
That is one half of the list. The other half matters just as much. The Congress keeps its weightier assignments. Shashi Tharoor stays at external affairs, Charanjit Singh Channi at agriculture and Mukul Wasnik with education, women, children, youth and sports. Saptagiri Sankar Ulaka keeps rural development and panchayati raj.
Ram Gopal Yadav of the Samajwadi Party (SP) continues at health and family welfare. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) holds two committees that count: Tiruchi Siva at industry, K. Kanimozhi at consumer affairs, food and public distribution.
The NDA constituents keep their share too. Sanjay Jha of the Janata Dal (United) stays at transport, tourism and culture; Shrirang Barne of the Shiv Sena at energy; Sunil Tatkare of the Nationalist Congress Party at petroleum and natural gas.
The old convention that important committees go to Opposition parties and allies is intact. What has changed is the arithmetic inside it. The BJP is stronger. The Congress, SP and DMK hold their ground. NDA partners keep their place. Regional parties go on cutting their own deals. But one party has been pushed out altogether, and it happens to be the one with a split the government can work with.
Why does any of this matter? After all, it’s just two committees that most voters perhaps are unfamiliar with. It matters because of what a chairperson controls. A parliamentary standing committee is not a party meeting. Its 31 members—21 from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha—come from across the House, and its reports do not bind the government. But the chair decides what the committee takes up, when it meets, who is called to give evidence, and how that evidence is examined. Those decisions shape the report. The report shapes the argument outside.
In a Parliaments where bills can pass in an afternoon and floor debate turns into theatre, the committee room offers the one thing the chamber does not: time. Time to read the fine print, call in the officials, and ask questions that cannot be drowned out.
That is why chairmanships have always been a quiet currency of parliamentary power. That is why this redistribution counts. The government has strengthened its institutional hand without having to shut anyone up. When the difficult subjects come, and they are coming, it will be presiding over most of the rooms where they get examined.
Commerce will have tariffs and trade deals. Defence will have procurement and preparedness. IT will have artificial intelligence and the mess of regulating a digital economy. Finance will sit under every argument about the state of the economy. And all four chairs are with the BJP.
Yet, every other party chairing a panel has something to prove here. The Congress, DMK and SP have kept platforms from which they can question the government in detail. They have to decide whether to use them for that or to turn committee meetings into one more venue for the slogans already in circulation outside. The BJP has the opposite problem. More chairs means more responsibility for keeping the committees credible as institutions rather than extensions of the treasury benches.
The TMC’s problem is of another kind. It has lost two chairs. That is the visible injury. The deeper one is the unsettled status of its rebels—and the Ghosh Dastidar appointment makes it harder to hide. A politician whose relationship with her party leadership is in open dispute now holds a formal position in Parliament that the party itself does not. Until the Speaker rules, that is how things stand.
When a ruling does come, its consequences will go well beyond committee assignments. In the meantime, a precedent is being set quietly. A party can be split in a state capital, and this can be given institutional form in Delhi.
There is a bigger story underneath. India’s Opposition has changed shape in the last few years. The INDIA bloc brought parties together for elections, but it never made them a single parliamentary organisation. Indeed state-level interests are stubborn. Regional parties keep their own books. Alliances bend under local pressure and sometimes break.
The standing committee list puts that on paper. The BJP is still the dominant force in the House. But the space around it is no longer one Opposition formation facing one coalition. It is a scatter of regional interests, separate calculations and in Bengal’s case, two groups fighting over the same party name. The government has read that scatter correctly, and used it.
The BJP has gained ground in the standing committee rooms. The Congress and the southern parties have held theirs. The TMC has been pushed to the edge, and one of its own rebels sits in a chair the party used to hold—in effect, a quarrel that began in West Bengal now has an address in New Delhi. The power map inside Parliament is changing, and the standing committees are beginning to reflect it.
