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Union railway minister Dinesh Trivedi sent his resignation letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the wee hours of Thursday, say TV reports. The PM is likely to forward the letter to president Prathiba Patil for acceptance.

After incurring the wrath of his leader, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, for hiking passenger fares without consulting her, Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi was on his way out as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has agreed to accept her demand that the party’s lone representative in the Union Cabinet be sacked.

A maverick Banerjee took the unprecedented step of demanding that Trivedi be fired hours after he presented the Railway Budget. Trivedi became persona non grata in his own party after Banerjee, “deeply upset” with the hike in passenger fares, faxed a letter to the Prime Minister demanding that the minister be removed.

She is understood to have requested the Prime Minister to appoint Minister of State for Shipping Mukul Roy as Railway minister, a proposition that the government is all set to accept. According to Congress sources, Roy will be given Cabinet rank and inducted as Railway minister once the General Budget is presented on Friday. Parliament is likely to debate the Railway Budget from Monday.

Sources said that the Congress’ Core Committee, which met around 10 pm to assess the situation after Banerjee faxed her letter to the Prime Minister’s Office, decided that there will be no complete rollback of hike in passenger fares, which Trivedi proposed earlier in the day, and that only a partial withdrawal would be considered.
Roy, who was in Chandigarh attending the swearing-in ceremony of Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal as Banerjee’s nominee, rushed to Kolkata after learning about the developments surrounding the Railway Budget.

Roy, whose elevation as Railway minister was opposed by Banerjee a few months ago when the Trinamool Congress chief quit Rail Bhavan to take charge as West Bengal chief minister, was told to rush to Delhi Thursday morning. Trivedi’s departure, which would be in the most unusual of circumstances, will mean that he will be the first Railway minister to resign so quickly after presenting his maiden Rail Budget.

After Trivedi proposed raising passenger fares, the West Bengal chief minister vowed to stonewall any bid by the UPA government to put additional burden on the people. As his own party put him on notice and made it clear that he might lose his job if the hikes were not rolled back, a piqued Trivedi said: “If working for the country is a revolt (against the party), so be it.”

Even as the TMC threatened to move cut motions on the Railway Budget, Trivedi justified the move to raise fares, claiming that he had taken a “conscious decision” in the best interest of the Railways and anyone else in the office of the Railway minister would have done the same. His justification for the hike in passenger fares failed to cut ice with his leader who summoned him to Kolkata for a meeting.

Minutes after Trivedi finished presenting the Railway Budget 2012-13 in the Lok Sabha, senior TMC leader and Union Minister of State for Health Sudip Bandopadhyay told journalists in the Parliament premises that his party would oppose the proposed hikes in passenger fares. A delegation of the TMC MPs led by Bandopadhyay later met Trivedi and demanded a rollback.

For the TMC, the fare hike proposals did not quite come as a bolt from the blue. Although Banerjee claimed she had no inkling about Trivedi’s proposals, Trinamool Congress sources insisted she was aware that Rail Bhavan was considering a hike in fares.

“We are against putting burden on the common people. I assure you that we will not accept the hike in fares and we will not allow it to take effect,” she said, addressing an audience at a West Bengal government programme in Nandigram.

The TMC maintained that the hike in fares was not in line with its pro-poor policies. “People across the country consider Mamata Banerjee as pro-poor. It is not our policy to increase tax on people....” Bandopadhyay said, adding that the “interests of the common people are more valuable for us than an individual.”

He also said that a delegation of party MPs would soon meet the Prime Minister and demand withdrawal of fare-hikes.

The TMC’s tirade against the proposals made by its own representative in the Union Cabinet fuelled speculation that it was a stage-managed act which  would give Banerjee yet another opportunity to assert her populist credentials in her state and to take on the Congress-led government, a step which might eventually lead to a partial rollback of the hikes, particularly in sleeper class fares.

Banerjee’s stand off over the Railway Budget is by far the strongest in recent months when it has proved to be a troublesome ally of the Congress.

The party, which commands 19 MPs in the Lok Sabha, has not only opposed the Lokpal bill’s provisions for setting up Lokayuktas in the states, its leader, Banerjee, also recently teamed up with other non-Congress chief ministers to oppose the government’s move to set up the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC). It was Banerjee’s contention that the NCTC violated the principles of federalism enshrined in the Constitution.

The Trinamool Congress  had earlier opposed the Central government’s decision to raise fuel prices, besides forcing it to put on hold the decision to raise foreign direct interest (FDI) in the multi-brand retail sector.