Making speculations about his exit from Trinamool Congress (TMC) more apparent, rebel leaber Suvendu Adhikari on Friday tendered his resignation from the West Bengal cabinet.

Adhikari, who was serving as the Minister in Charge of Transport, Irrigation and Water resource in Govt. of West Bengal, had also served his resignation from the post of Hooghly River Bridge Commissioners’ (HRBC) chairman on Wednesday night.

The development comes after, TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee called out the “opportunists” at her own party and warned them that she was in the know-how of everything from a rally in Bankura on Wednesday.

“You may see a few who are Trinamool workers but are in contact with others as well. Don’t think that Didi doesn’t know.

“We believe that they are opportunists. There’s a group of these opportunists. They are very small in number. Keep a vigil on who is going where in the dark of the night. Who’s speaking to whom over the phone. Watch who’s leaving in a car without any reason,” the West Bengal Chief Minister said.

Adhikari has been a hotshot political property in West Bengal ever since he started a rebellion against his own party. He had begun expressing his disenchantment with TMC with indirect jibes at “apolitical” meetings and rallies.

However, a couple of meetings between him and veteran TMC leader Saugata Roy was deemed as the ice-breaker. One such meet on Monday, which was expected to finalise whether or not Adhikari would stay, failed to find a solution, reported Bengali news portal The Wall. What conspired between the two TMC strongmen hasn’t been reported yet.

One of the architects of TMC’s Nandigram revolution, Adhikari, the Nandigram MLA, is still a major force of the party’s ground-level organisation in the state. Suvendu’s departure from TMC could be fateful for West Bengal’s governning party in next year’s election.

BJP has also jumped into the high-voltage drama and gave calls to Adhikari to join the hindutva brigade on many occasions. Party’s state president in West Bengal, Dilip Ghosh, and others have already said that the door was always open for him to join BJP.

Bengali media has been filled with reports of Adhikari being in touch with senior BJP leaders. Even though the former TMC youth secretary has never said about switching to the saffron camp, his unhappiness with Abhishek Banerjee, Kalyan Banerjee and TMC’s election strategist Prashant Kishor has been an open secret for some time now.