BJP emerges principal gainer ahead of assembly battles
Amritsar, April 25, 2026 (Bharat Khabarnama Bureau) : When seven Rajya Sabha MPs walked out of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Friday and merged with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), they did not just reduced AAP’s upper house strength to three. They put the number 82 on a problem that the party had been living with for last fourteen years but never quite confronting.
In Indian politics, especially in this decade, where defections are routine, allurement is an option and loyalty is transactional, the desertions tell a story that cannot be dismissed as a run of bad luck or the ordinary friction of growing political aspirations. Since its founding on November 26, 2012, AAP has lost several founding members, sitting MPs, cabinet ministers, MLAs, state conveners and organisational workers across 11 states.
The BJP has been the single largest beneficiary, absorbing defectors from every level like Shazia Ilmi and Kiran Bedi from the founding era, Kapil Mishra from the Delhi cabinet, H.S. Phoolka and Sheetal Angural from Punjab and now seven Rajya Sabha MPs in a single afternoon. The Congress has gained selectively, reclaiming leaders like Dharamvira Gandhi and Sukhpal Singh Khaira who were once among AAP’s most recognisable faces in Punjab.
The seven who left on Friday include Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, Ashok Mittal, Rajinder Gupta, Harbhajan Singh, Swati Maliwal and Vikramjit Singh Sahney who cleared the two-thirds threshold required under the anti-defection law, making the merger legally valid and their Rajya Sabha seats safe. AAP’s Sanjay Singh has reiterated it ‘Operation Lotus’, pointing to the Enforcement Directorate’s raids on Ashok Mittal’s university campus barely ten days before the defection as evidence of coercion.
Chief Minister Bhagwant Singh Mann has called it a betrayal of Punjab. Both responses are aimed at the party’s base and both have a political logic. But the AAP party and the chief minister have not answered for the 75 leaders who left before 2026 or the ones who left before the ED was ever mentioned in the same sentence as AAP’s Rajya Sabha bench. The party had earlier levelled similar allegations of ‘Operation Lotus’, even got an FIR lodged, but failed to prove the charges. The narrative of external pressure, however convenient, does not travel that far back in time or across that many states.
The centralisation of authority at Punjab dispensation is in Kejriwal’s hands, which may be a practical necessity in the early years when speed and decisiveness were essential, became over time a structural constraint that many experienced leaders and volunteers found impossible to work within. The ones who stayed were either true (Kattad) believers or had nowhere better to go or had learned to operate within the constraints of Delhi leaders. The ones who left made the calculation that they did not. That calculation, repeated 82 times across 14 years, is the more uncomfortable explanation that the party has yet to publicly reckon with.
That reckoning now arrives at the worst possible moment. The question ‘Punjab 2027’ is about to ask is straightforward: can a party absorb the loss of its principal parliamentary face, its chief national organiser and five other prominent members all in one week and still fight competitive state elections in the remaining eight months?
History offers a sobering context. Except for the Shiromani Akali Dal, no political party has returned to power in Punjab in the past four decades. Voters in the state have consistently shown the door to sitting governments regardless of their majority or their record. AAP enters the 2027 campaign as the incumbent with 92 seats, a number that looks commanding until you remember that Congress entered 2022 with a majority of its own and was reduced to a rump.
The organisational damage from Friday’s departures is where the real vulnerability lies. Raghav Chadha was the party’s most visible parliamentary advocate on Punjab affairs. But Sandeep Pathak’s departure is the more consequential loss for the party to steer the campaign ahead. He was the architecture behind AAP’s ground machinery, the person who connected the party’s leadership in Delhi to its booth workers in Malwa and the Doaba. That institutional knowledge does not transfer to a successor overnight, and the party does not have the luxury of time.
The political signals from the opposition are already pointed. State Congress president Amarinder Singh Raja Warring has said publicly that more elected representatives from the ruling AAP are likely to desert the party and join others in the coming weeks. SAD leader Bikram Singh Majithia has said the same, suggesting that Friday’s departures are the beginning of a longer unravelling rather than a contained episode. Both have an obvious interest in projecting this narrative, but the fact that they feel confident enough to say it aloud reflects a reading of internal AAP sentiment that the party cannot simply dismiss.
Even from within, the warning signs are visible. Lok Sabha MP Malwinder Singh Kang, one of AAP’s sitting members from Punjab, has publicly urged the party leadership to listen to the concerns of its leaders and keep the flock together. It is a careful, measured statement but the fact that it needed to be said at all and said publicly, speaks to the anxiety inside the party about what comes next. One sitting MLA from Amritsar, a former police officer, is already openly opposing the government.
What comes next, in practical terms, is a campaign in a state where anti-incumbency is structural, the opposition is energised by the defections, the BJP has absorbed significant AAP talent and resources and the party’s own MPs are urging the leadership to pay attention to those still inside before it loses more of them. Bhagwant Mann’s government can present a governance record to defend and a welfare agenda to project. Those remain real assets. But elections in Punjab are won and lost on the organisation, on the ground-level machinery that turns sentiment into votes and on the confidence of workers who need to believe their party is going somewhere rather than coming apart.
The list of 82 is not the story in itself. It is the backdrop against which the 2027 campaign would be fought. And right now, the backdrop is not flattering.
