Twenty-eight years after she walked out of the Congress and established a party with a green grass stem topped with two flowers, Mamata Banerjee is now battling to save that same symbol from being removed by the party she created. Hours after the Election Commission assigned a football player to her party and an envelope to its rival on Friday, the former chief minister of West Bengal moved the Supreme Court against its decision to stop Trinamool Congress from using its name and symbol "Jora Ghas Phul" till the issue of ownership is resolved on merits.

The petitioners have included the Election Commission and Ritabrata Banerjee, who is the Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly, as respondents. It arrives just after the poll body accepted a fortnight ago submissions from both camps in Delhi, after giving them a deadline to reply by Sunday, September 16, and extended that bypolls ban to the "All India Trinamool Congress" banner and its reserved twin-flower mark another two nights later on October 6. A day later, the Commission allocated the name "Mamata All India Trinamool Congress" to the Banerjee camp with a football player as its poll symbol and "Democratic Trinamool Congress" to the breakaway group of Arup Roy and supported by Ritabrata Banerjee with an envelope.

All this is rooted in the result of the May Assembly election in which the Trinamool lost its first election in 15 years and Suvendu Adhikari's government was installed. Nandigram and Rejinagar, the two seats the counting of which will commence on October 6, didn't go to the polls as Adhikari also won an additional Nandigram seat called Bhabanipur and another ally forfeited Rejinagar. The Assembly defeat ushered in a revolt within the Assembly's party building.

The numbers were hard to believe but around fifty-eight of the party's total of about eighty MLAs eventually joined Ritabrata Banerjee's camp, while some twenty members of about twenty-eight Trinamool Lok Sabha members joined the ranks of Banerjee's camp and Banerjee's camp had a shrunken rump in both houses. In June, the rebel legislators had voted for Ritabrata as Leader of Opposition, rather than Banerjee's choice of Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, and the Speaker's subsequent recognition of the result, which looks like the first real organisational split in the Trinamool's history, sealed it.

The numbers are important because in such a scenario, the Election Commission (ESRO), according to the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968, puts a lot of faith in the test of majority support within the wings of the party. That exactly was the system the poll body was using when it decided the Congress split in 1969 when Indira Gandhi's camp had to show its control over the party's objectives, its constitution and its numbers to the Syndicate faction.

This parallel has not gone unnoticed by those who have followed this controversy, because it is essentially the same legal issue which decided Indian party politics over 50 years ago. The difference with the situation in the current case is one of timing: the Commission has opted for an interim freeze instead of an immediate award to either faction, forcing both sides to use new names and symbols for a byelection that was always going to be seen as a test of which faction holds the ground in Nandigram and Rejinagar.

Political response is loud from all quarters. The Congress, which saw Banerjee walk out of its own ranks in 1998, has denounced the freeze, with its general secretary, K.C. Venugopal, saying the timing of Banerjee's order on Thursday night on the Prime Minister's birthday was a pointed and unflattering coincidence for the Commission's neutrality. Rahul Gandhi took it a step further and included the symbol freeze in his bigger sheet of charges against the poll body for irregularities in the electoral rolls, which was viewed as vote theft followed by government capture, and now in his words, the government had captured a party. For its part, the BJP has sat tight, hoping to see its biggest rival in Bengal, the Trinamool, engage in a battle for supremacy in public, without having to get involved.

The legal wrangling is the backdrop to an economy that's not so easily put to the test for a family feud. The gross state domestic product of West Bengal has been estimated in recent years to be almost nineteen lakh crore rupees and the successive Bengal Global Business Summits brought in commitments of tens of thousands of crore rupees, with the Reliance group, the RP-Sanjiv Goenka group and others, signing up for well in excess of sixty thousand crore rupees combined, and a record MSME lending, reaching nearly one and a half lakh crore rupees in one year.

The optics of a split ruling establishment challenging a flower, in and around Nandigram which is itself part of an industrial corridor with Haldia petrochemical hub, is not a mere curiosity for boardrooms keeping a close eye on the state's investment climate ahead of the next cycle of the Business Summit. A long court battle, over who was right to represent the party, which has been in control of the state for a course of fourteen years, is not the sort of headline, which will reassure the capital, in search of administrative continuity.

The next steps will be largely up to the apex court, which will have to make its decision soon, with the byelection window being extremely tight, and the Commission's eventual final decision, which will only come once a fuller hearing on the merits. Banerjee's own camp has cited her re-election as the basis for her legitimacy and said that the mandate expired till January 2027.The Ritabrata camp has stated that the mandate expired with her previous tenure.