India’s youngest national party, the Aam Aadmi Party, suffered its most serious split on Friday with its former Rajya Sabha deputy leader Raghav Chadha and six other Upper House MPs joining the BJP.
While the departures of Chadha and Swati Maliwal had been a long time coming, the defection by IIT professor-turned AAP strategist and MP Sandeep Pathak has shocked the party.
The others to jump ship are the party’s moneybags from Punjab — Rajya Sabha deputy leader Ashok Mittal, Rajinder Gupta and Vikramjit Sahney — and former Test cricketer Harbhajan Singh.
The breakup of a party that had projected itself as “kattar imandar” (staunchly honest) and immune to defections comes just a year before elections in AAP-ruled Punjab.
The party is now left with three members each in either House of Parliament.
“I am telling you the real reason as to why I distanced myself from party activities. I did not want to be a part of their crimes…,” Chadha, flanked by Pathak and Mittal, told reporters at the Constitution Club here.
“We had just two options — either quit politics and give up our public work in the last 15-16 years, or we do positive politics with our energy and experience. So, we have decided that we, two-thirds (of the) members belonging to the AAP in (the) Rajya Sabha, exercise the provisions of the Constitution of India and merge ourselves with the BJP.”
Six of the rebels met BJP president Nitin Nabin in the evening. The seventh, Maliwal, estranged from the party since a physical altercation at AAP supreme leader Arvind Kejriwal’s residence in 2024, is in Itanagar as member of a parliamentary panel.
She tweeted her decision to leave the party, blaming “the unchecked corruption growing in the Aam Aadmi Party under Kejriwal ji’s patronage, incidents of harassment and assault against women, the promotion of thuggish elements, and the betrayal and looting happening with Punjab”.
An AAP source told The Telegraph: “It’s their loss. Their financial contributions to the party have sustained our work in Gujarat, Goa and Delhi. Too bad they won’t be in the party to see their contributions bear fruit....
“It was unfortunately a necessity to send some of these businessmen to the Rajya Sabha at a time when the party’s coffers were completely empty before the 2022 Gujarat polls and Delhi municipal polls.”
Jalandhar-based business magnate Mittal had replaced Chadha as the party’s deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha on April 2. He and his son faced Enforcement Directorate raids 10 days ago.
Chadha, a founder-member and youth icon of the party, had remained absent from campaigning in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls of 2024, having gone to London for surgery. He has been aloof from his party for more than a year.
Pathak practically ran the party when Kejriwal was in jail in the liquor policy case in 2024.
AAP Rajya Sabha leader Sanjay Singh tweeted that he would ask the Rajya Sabha Chair to disqualify Chadha, Mittal and Pathak from the House under Schedule 10 of the Constitution (the anti-defection law).
Schedule 10 disqualifies defectors from legislative bodies but grants an exemption to lawmakers who merge into a party, among other options, provided the defectors make up at least two-thirds of the members of the original legislature party.
Constitutional experts have long called for the exemption clause to be rewritten to eliminate certain ambiguities that have defeated the purpose of preventing horse-trading.