The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) plans to address Rajya Sabha Chairman, Vice-Chairman C P Radhakrishnan and Chairman Draupadi Murmu separately, seeking action against seven Rajya Sabha MPs who quit the party on Friday, AAP leaders and people familiar with the matter said on Saturday.
These moves represent a coordinated attempt by the PJD leadership to cushion the shock caused by the sudden departure of some of its key leaders less than a year before the Lok Sabha elections in Punjab.
Senior AAP leader and SP MP Sanjay Singh said he would write to Radhakrishnan seeking exclusion of the seven rebel lawmakers from the Upper House. “This is illegal, wrong, unconstitutional and against parliamentary rules… I will write to the Speaker of the Rajya Sabha, the honorable Deputy Speaker… requesting that the membership of all seven Rajya Sabha MPs be completely terminated,” Singh said at a press conference in Delhi.
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Even as the party plans to continue working within Parliament, it is looking to escalate the matter at the constitutional level. Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann also sought an appointment with the president to formally demand the “recall” of the six elected defectors from the state, people familiar with the matter said.
Certainly, the Constitution does not contain any such provision. In February, Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha – who emerged as the face of Friday’s rebellion – mooted a “right of recall” mechanism to allow voters to remove inactive elected representatives before the end of their term. “No confidence clause is not available in the Constitution under any timeline at all. There is no scope for no confidence,” said Ashok Agarwal, former Solicitor General of Punjab.
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Seven of AAP’s 10 MLAs in the Senate will leave the party and join the BJP, Chadha announced on Friday, throwing the AAP into turmoil a year after it lost power in Delhi and raising existential questions about the functioning of the party and its president Arvind Kejriwal. The group of rebel leaders includes Chaddha, Ashok Mittal, Sandeep Pathak, Rajender Gupta, Vikram Sahni, Harbhajan Singh and Swati Maliwal. Chadha, Mittal and Pathak joined the BJP on Friday. Maliwal on Saturday announced that she has joined the BJP after “due consideration”.
In a surprise press conference on Friday, Chadha said the group constitutes two-thirds of the AAP’s Rajya Sabha strength and will merge with the BJP. But Singh said these numbers did not provide any protection under the anti-defection law. He said: “Whether there are seven members or more, such defections have no legal basis.”
Independent Rajya Sabha MP and senior advocate Kapil Sibal said the merger is unconstitutional unless the party itself decides to merge first. “No one can simply merge on their own. The Constitution says that a political party must first take a decision at the organizational level, pass a resolution deciding that as a political party it wants to merge with the BJP, only then can it be done,” news agency PTI quoted him as saying.
Former Lok Sabha secretary general PDT Achary told HT on Friday that the seven MPs are “not immune from disqualification”.
In the immediate aftermath of the exodus, Mann accused the BJP of trying to break the AAP ahead of the elections in Punjab. The Punjab chief minister is expected to meet the president “along with a delegation of AAP MLAs” from the northern state to formally present the party’s stand against dissidents, people familiar with the plan said.
Responding to questions on whether the AAP leadership had anticipated the rebellion, Singh claimed that the movements became apparent after the Enforcement Directorate raided premises linked to Mittal earlier in the month. “After the ED raid on Ashok Mittal’s residence, things have become quite clear. The BJP itself was calling him a thief, but now he is clean. The BJP’s washing machine is working,” he said. Singh said there was no threat of defections among RJD legislators in Punjab.
Delhi AAP chief Saurabh Bharadwaj alleged that central agencies were being used to pressure opposition leaders and weaken the party from within. “Attempts are being made to break the morale of Karyakartas [workers]But we will not stop asking questions,” he called on workers to remain steadfast during what he described as a “difficult phase.”
The BJP denied AAP’s allegations, with Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva saying party leaders were reacting out of frustration over Friday’s developments. Sachdeva alleged that since Friday, Kejriwal has deployed senior leaders to intimidate dissident MPs with what he described as hollow threats. “However, he forgot that all the seven MPs are reputed and well-educated individuals who were feeling suffocated in AAP for a long time… In the end, they chose to follow their conscience and parted ways with AAP,” he said.
(With inputs from office in Chandigarh)
