Historic blow to Kejriwal’s party
Chandigarh, April 24, 2026 (Bharat Khabarnama Bureau) : In the most severe internal crisis since its founding, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) suffered a decisive rupture on Friday when seven of its ten Rajya Sabha members formally announced their resignation from the party and announced to merge with the Bharatiya Janata Party in coming days. The seven MPs signed and submitted a letter to the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, C.P. Radhakrishnan, informing him about their decision to leave the party and merge AAP’s legislative party in the Rajya Sabha with the BJP.
MP Raghav Chadha has made this announcement during a press conference, who was accompanied by fellow MPs Sandeep Dikshit and Ashok Mittal at New Delhi. The departing MPs charged that AAP under Arvind Kejriwal has drifted far beyond the founding principles that first brought the party into existence.
The seven MPs, who have merged with BJP including Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, Ashok Mittal, Rajinder Gupta, Harbhajan Singh, Swati Maliwal and Vikramjit Singh Sahney.
Membership protected under anti-defection law
Under the tenth Schedule of the Constitution of India, as amended by the 91st Constitutional Amendment Act of 2003, a merger of a legislative party with another political party is valid and protected from disqualification when at least two-thirds of the members of that legislative party consent to it. Since seven of AAP’s ten Rajya Sabha members have joined the merger, the threshold is met decisively. None of the seven MPs would lose their Rajya Sabha membership as a result of this decision. The three remaining AAP members are similarly protected from disqualification under the same provision.
The development leaves the Aam Aadmi Party with just three members in the Rajya Sabha. It is by any measure one of the most consequential defections in the upper house in recent memory and arrives at a moment when AAP is already fighting to retain its political foothold ahead of the crucial Punjab assembly elections in 2027.
Chadha’s sidelining had signalled the break
Raghav Chadha was elected to the Rajya Sabha by the Punjab Legislative Assembly in 2022 and had been widely credited with steering the party to its landslide victory in the state that year, when AAP swept 92 of 117 assembly seats. A chartered accountant by training, he was once considered among the party’s most polished parliamentary voices. Tensions between Chadha and the AAP leadership had, however, been building for months. On April 2, the party removed him as its deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha and took the additional step of requesting that he not be allotted speaking time from AAP’s quota in the House, an unmistakable signal of estrangement.
Pathak’s exit hollows out party apparatus
Sandeep Pathak, AAP’s national general secretary and the principal organiser of its grassroots operations, is arguably the most consequential departure for the party’s internal functioning. He has remained an active and senior presence in Parliament and has not been personally implicated in any legal proceedings. His value to AAP lay entirely in his organisational role: the painstaking work of building and sustaining the party’s ground network across states, which formed the backbone of AAP’s electoral machinery. That network, and his command of it, now moves with him. His exit leaves a vacuum that will not be easy to fill in the months leading into the Punjab campaign.
Mittal departs weeks after his elevation
Ashok Mittal, founder of Lovely Professional University in Jalandhar, had only just been elevated to replace Chadha as AAP’s deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha when the Enforcement Directorate conducted searches at around 8 to 10 premises linked to him and the Lovely Group on April 15, including the university campus, in connection with a probe under the Foreign Exchange Management Act. The searches also covered his son’s properties and a farmhouse in Gurugram. AAP had characterised the raids as election-related pressure by the Centre. Mittal departs having served only weeks in the leadership role to which he had been appointed.
A broad cross-section of the party walks out
What gives this merger particular weight is the breadth of the group involved. Beyond the three MPs whose individual circumstances had been widely discussed in recent weeks, the departing bloc includes Rajinder Gupta, one of the wealthiest members of the Rajya Sabha, former Indian cricket star Harbhajan Singh, Swati Maliwal, who had been at the centre of a high-profile public dispute with the Kejriwal household last year, and Vikramjit Singh Sahney, a prominent industrialist from Punjab. Their collective departure signals that dissatisfaction with the AAP leadership extends well beyond any single grievance or individual case.
TWEET by Raghav Chadha
https://x.com/raghav_chadha/status/2047640427894055293?s=46
Today, exercising the provisions of the Constitution of India, more than two-thirds of the AAP MPs in the Rajya Sabha have merged with the BJP. Seven MPs have signed the document, which was submitted to the Hon’ble Chairman of the Rajya Sabha. I, along with two other MPs, personally handed over the signed documents.
AAP Strikes Back
The AAP leadership hit back sharply at the departing MPs, with Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Maan hurriedly called a press conference and accused them of betraying both the party and the people of Punjab. Maan said that AAP had given these leaders everything, elevating them to the corridors of Parliament, and that their decision to walk out amounted to a stab in the back of the very organisation that had built their political careers. He alleged that the seven MPs had conspired with the BJP rather than arrived at their decision independently.
Meanwhile, senior AAP Rajya Sabha member Sanjay Singh while addressing a conference went further, calling the mass defection “Operation Lotus”, a term the party has previously used to describe what it claims is the BJP’s systematic practice of engineering defections through the threat of central agency action. He specifically pointed to the Enforcement Directorate raids conducted at the premises of Ashok Mittal barely ten days ago as evidence that coercion, not conviction, lay behind the departures. The AAP framed the entire episode not as an internal crisis born of genuine ideological differences but as a BJP-orchestrated manoeuvre carried out under institutional pressure.
