An apex body of the Trinamool Congress, in a meeting on Monday chaired by its supremo Mamata Banerjee, claimed to have held strategic deliberations on major issues of national importance to grill the BJP-led Centre, but Gautam Adani, inexplicably, didn’t make the cut.

The revelation was made by Bengal finance minister Chandrima Bhattacharya, who briefed journalists on Monday evening after the Trinamool national working committee met at 30B Harish Chatterjee Street.

Hours before, the party gave the Congress-convened INDIA meeting a miss at the onset of the Parliament's winter session, likely to be stormy because of the anti-BJP bloc's plan to corner Narendra Modi on bribery charges against Adani.

Asked if TMC would stay away from such INDIA meetings, Bhattacharya said: “Keep watching.”

“Why are you getting this eager to know about INDIA? This was our national working committee meeting…. No one has said we are not participating (in INDIA meetings),” she added. On whether the Adani issue featured in the talks, she was vaguely dismissive.

Beyond the social media tirade by its MPs such as Mahua Moitra, Sagarika Ghose and Saket Gokhale who have been individually vocal against the alleged Adani-BJP nexus, Trinamool has been largely noncommittal over the latest Adani row.

The top two of Bengal’s ruling party — Mamata and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee — remained conspicuous in their silence after US authorities indicted the Adani Group chairman and two executives at Adani Green Energy, accused of agreeing to pay over 250 million USD in bribes to government officials to win lucrative solar energy supply contracts.

“There were categorical instructions about active participation in Parliament and asserting our identity in the national Opposition space.... and not following the herd impulse of following everything the Congress does,” said a Trinamool veteran. “But rather surprisingly, there were no clear instructions on the Adani issue. Fertilisers, Awas Yojana, MGNREGA, inflation, Manipur and the Northeast, central deprivation of Bengal.... so many other things were specifically mentioned,” he added. “It is understood that it (the Adani issue) is, for now, being left to the Parliamentary party in both Houses to figure it out and run it by her (Mamata).”

He pointed out that early last year, Trinamool wasn’t found lacking in its public belligerence over the Hindenburg report against the Adani Group. “At one point last year, she even said in private that the Adani issue might turn out to be Modi’s Waterloo, and we should stop pulling punches,” he said.

For about a year now, the Trinamool-led state government appears to have been distancing itself from the Adani Group, since announcing its decision to decouple the proposed Tajpur port project from the conglomerate.

On Trinamool's silence on the Adani issue amid allegations of the CPM and Congress of a Mamata-Modi "setting", TMC leader Kunal Ghosh said there were many issues to be raised in Parliament. "If you only stall Parliament, hold it to ransom, by shouting 'Adani! Adani! Adani! Adani!' in trying to corner the BJP, you end up helping the BJP. Do we want that?" he asked.