After seven of the AAP’s 10 Rajya Sabha MPs quit the party and merged with the BJP on Friday, videos of Union Minister and BJP leader Ravneet Singh Bittu’s Raghav Chadha going viral on Punjabi social media as the AAP-ruled state heads to the polls in about 10 months.
Rajya Sabha member Bittu, who is among the BJP’s new recruits as the party tries to make its own mark in Punjab, said last week that there was “no need” for Chadha to enter the BJP as he was “already doing the work he is doing”, referring to Chadha’s attacks on the Arvind Kejriwal-led party.
Punjab is in the spotlight because of the seven AAP MPs who have now switched sides, six of them belong to that state, including Chadha, who is ethnically Punjabi Hindu but based in Delhi. Besides Chadha, there is AAP strategist Sandeep Pathak. In addition to industrialists Ashok Mittal, Vikramjit Sahni and Rajinder Gupta and cricketer Harbhajan Singh. Swai Maliwal entered the Rajya Sabha from Delhi.
“The reason is that I did not want to be apart of their sins,” Chadha said, when he announced his switch to the BJP on Friday. The BJP has accused AAP leaders of corruption in recent years.
Meanwhile, Bittu’s comments highlighted the complexity of the BJP’s lone foray into Punjab – and Chadha’s plan for Punjab if there is one – with the state voting early next year.
“Now, even the people who have the government in their grip and control are speaking out,” Beto said in an interview last week about the 2027 elections.
Chadha mentioned in this context, after the latter had already been removed by the AAP as its deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha on April 2.
Bittu said: “No matter what anyone says, Raghav Chadha was the be-all and end-all of the Aam Aadmi Party. Today he stands on the other side. So, how many inner secrets will he reveal in the coming days?” He made similar assertions in multiple interactions.
Chadha was AAP’s Punjab affairs co-incharge and was largely credited with the party’s landslide victory in the 2022 elections, in which it won 92 of the 117 seats. However, there was some anger, even within the AAP when Chadha and Sandeep Pathak, a native of Chhattisgarh, both party strategists but “outsiders”, were chosen for the Revolutionary Socialists seats from Punjab in 2022.
What did Beto say?
Bittu was sent to the Rajya Sabha by the BJP from Rajasthan after he lost the Lok Sabha elections in Ludhiana in 2024, soon after he switched loyalties from the Congress party after decades of family ties.
He was pointedly asked if Chadha could join the BJP after his public spat with AAP. “No, the need for him to join the BJP will only arise if he is not actually doing the work he is doing. He is doing it himself, so there is no need to force him to join. They are doing the dancing themselves,” Bittu said in an April 12 interview with a web channel.
He blamed Chadha for his imprisonment (briefly over a protest in 2024), and said CM Bhagwant Mann was under pressure from Chadha and Kejriwal. “I have endured a lot because of Chadha… Being a man, he does modeling!” Beto noted. He made another quip in a different interaction: “This Punjab is the land of lions, where there are men with long, proud beards. This clean-shaven man – if you slap him once, the marks won’t fade for two months.”
There was no reaction from Chadha, and neither the BJP nor Bittu had clarified his latest comments, as of April 25 evening.
Bittu is among the most recognizable faces of the BJP in Punjab at present, and he said that while he wants to contest the 2027 Vidhan Sabha elections “probably from Ludhiana”, the decision on who to face as chief minister “lies with the disciplined process of the party”.
Chadha in Punjab
Meanwhile, Chadha declared his love and commitment to Punjab. After being accused of raising only “soft issues” in the Rajya Sabha, he engaged in batches of his parliamentary speeches on Punjab-centric issues like agricultural produce prices, groundwater depletion, honors for freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, and financial dues to the state from the Centre.
“Punjab is not a talking point for me. It is my commitment. It is my soul,” he said in a post on X.
It is not clear whether he will contest the Assembly elections or play a role as the ‘outside’ strike returns via Congress and SAD comments as well.
Punjab Congress president Amarindi Singh Waring said: “AAP has no ideology. This was normal. These MPs have no importance in Punjab. AAP should stay informed – 50 MLAs may join BJP next!”
AAP’s reaction and BJP’s ambition in Punjab
CM Bhagwant Mann was dismissive: “These six or seven MPs were not from the party. They were not mass leaders. None of them are capable of becoming even a village sarpanch.”
He said they originally chose to be prominent in their fields. “But there is no mind-reading machine,” he said at a press conference on Friday. He called these MPs “wall” or traitors of Punjab, and described the BJP as a party of “kaddhe, waddhe te chhadde” (the expelled, divided and backward) – a play on Punjabi words clearly mocking Chadha.
Man Bittu also mentioned: “Has anyone heard about these leaders who joined the BJP (from other parties… Even Ravneet Singh Bittu will be sidelined the day the BJP knows that it has no influence in the state).
At the joining ceremony of Chadha and the group at the BJP headquarters in Delhi, among those present was Tarun Chugh, the BJP’s national general secretary whose roots go back to Amritsar state in Punjab.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, which has only two MPs in the 117-seat House, now has six MPs, up from zero.
It was never able to win power in Punjab alone, and in its best years it was a junior partner of the Punjab provincial government. However, Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced at a rally in Moga in March that the party would contest the 2027 elections alone, officially ending any possibility of reviving the Akali-BJP alliance that collapsed during the farmers’ protest in 2020. [voters] They have given a chance to all political parties. “Now give us one chance,” Shah said.
The BJP received about 19% of Punjab’s votes in the 2024 assembly polls in which it contested alone, but did not bag any seats. He has been building his list in Punjab through agitation from across the political spectrum, including Bittu. More recently, in April, HS Phoolka — a human rights lawyer who became an AAP MLA in 2017 and was leader of the opposition before publicly leaving to focus on his work for victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots — officially joined the BJP.
But the 2027 contest is shaping up as a multi-party battle involving the RJD, the main opposition Congress party, and the regional and Sikh powerhouse, the Shiromani Akali Dal; And the Bharatiya Janata Party.
