By the time Raghav Chadha walked out of the Indian Constitution Club in New Delhi on Friday afternoon – and entered the BJP office five kilometers away – the Aam Aadmi Party’s calculus had changed particularly in Punjab, where it governs, and elections are due in less than a year.
AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal’s reaction also referred to Punjab, not Chadha or the other six who switched to the BJP. It is clear that what happens in Delhi does not stay in Delhi. Of the party’s 10 Rajya Sabha MPs, seven have merged with the BJP and six of them are from Punjab. They cited the constitutional two-thirds merger clause that protects them from disqualification.
The only AAP Rajya Sabha MP from Punjab now is Balbir Singh Seechewal – an environmental activist, Padma Shri recipient and popular personality, best known for reviving the 160-km-long Kali Bein river.
Seechewal was one of the AAP’s nominations for the 2022 Rajya Sabha after winning by a landslide in Punjab.
Raghav Chadha and Sandeep Pathak were two of the key strategists of AAP who were rewarded for their electoral work in Punjab. These two men, along with industrialist Ashok Kumar Mittal, held a press conference in Delhi on Friday where they announced the major shift. These three later officially joined the BJP.
Others who have made the switch among Punjab AAP MPs are former cricketer Harbhajan Singh, industrialists Rajender Gupta and Vikramjit Singh Sahni. Plus there is Delhi’s Swati Maliwal who has been at constant loggerheads with AAP since 2024.
What Bhagwant Man said
Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann’s reaction has been combative, as was the case when Chadha and AAP announced their slow separation earlier in April.
“These six or seven representatives were not the party. They were not mass leaders. None of them are capable of becoming even a village sarpanch,” he said. These deputies were called the “wall”. Traitors of Punjab, describing the BJP as a party of “kaddhe, waddhe te chhadde” (the expelled, divided, and backward) – a Punjabi wordplay clearly mocking Chadhas.
As for why the party chose them, he said that they are accomplished in their fields of specialization and that the party wants to bring in good people across fields. “Despite advances in science and technology, there is no machine that can read minds. Tell me if there is such a machine and if I can order one from Amazon!” Mann, the comedian-turned-politician, said this at a press conference in Chandigarh.
Kejriwal’s first reaction was a one-line post on X saying that the BJP has betrayed Punjabis. He did not speak further about it until eight o’clock on Friday evening.
Chadha claimed that he distanced himself from the party, saying: “I did not want to be part of their crimes.” He has been MIA in AAP affairs since around 2023 after he was also accused of being a ‘Super CM’ in Punjab.
“The party is no longer working for the country or national interest, but for personal gain,” he said on Friday, speaking only indirectly about the corruption allegations related to the 2023 Delhi excise policy case in which Kejriwal and 22 others were recently released by a trial court. Chad praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “performance record”.
At the joining ceremony at the BJP headquarters, attendees included Tarun Chugh, the BJP’s national general secretary whose roots go back to Amritsar state in Punjab.
Controversy over RS nominations
AAP faced criticism when it picked the Rajya Sabha seat in Punjab for two non-Punjabi residents in the first batch – Pathak from Chhattisgarh and Chadha from Delhi. The others were from Punjab: Harbhajan Singh, Mittal and another industrialist, Sanjeev Arora.
When two seats fell vacant months later, the party selected two prominent Punjabi Padma Shri awardees – Seewal and Vikramjit Singh Sahni. Sahni has now also defected.
The “outsider” argument was even mentioned at the time in a song by slain rapper Sidhu Musiwala, who was in Congress. “In his song ‘Scapegoat’, Pete says in Punjabi: ‘Tell me who is responsible for what happened to the Rajya Sabha benches, and tell me who is the traitor now,’” recalls political analyst and history professor Harjeshwar Pal Singh.
The collapse of the Rajya Sabha is the most dramatic setback the AAP has suffered in a single day in Punjab, or in its history in general. The Lok Sabha numbers were not encouraging either; In 2024, the main opposition Congress party won seven of the 13 Lok Sabha seats in Punjab. AAP won three.
The BJP bagged a complete blank while the SP won one seat, with two seats going to independents allied with the hardline Sikh groupings.
The AAP has since focused on delivering welfare schemes, including recently fulfilling its promise $1,100 per month for almost all women of the state.
Is a broken opposition an advantage for the BJP?
The BJP, which has just two MLAs in the 117-seat assembly, enters the contest with an aggressive brand. 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 fully contest in 2027 on its own, officially ending any possibility of reviving the Akali-BJP alliance. “You gave all political parties a chance. Now give us one chance,” he 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. Its leaders said the base could be expanded, similar to the states of Assam, Tripura and Uttarakhand.
But these are states that do not have the demographics of Punjab, a Sikh majority, and the recent history of the agitation that ended the SAD-BJP alliance in 2020 and made Prime Minister Narendra Modi roll back three farm laws. The party’s presence in rural areas remains limited.
It has built its list in Punjab through agitation from across the political spectrum.
More recently, in April, HS Phoolka — a human rights lawyer who won the Dhaka seat for the AAP in 2017 and remained leader of the opposition before leaving saying he wanted to focus solely on his fight for the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots — officially joined the BJP.
But the state elections are not a story between the RJD and the BJP, as was the case in the case of the Chaddha shift.
The 2027 contest is shaping up as a multi-party battle involving the AAP, the Congress and the Shiromani Akali Dal in the hope of arriving at a narrative of its own for the region. The BJP hopes to finally achieve this on its own.
The Congress is so far facing some internal differences with state unit president Amarinder Singh Raja Waring, Leader of the Opposition Partap Singh Bajwa, and Chief Minister Sab s Charanjit Singh Channi, all of whom have a great reputation. The process of rebuilding SAD under the leadership of Sukhbir Singh Badal is underway in the long term.
Harjeshwar Pal Singh said the switch made by Chadha and others “made a mockery of the rule of the people”.
“The party (BJP) which has two members in the assembly now has six members in the Rajya Sabha from Punjab,” he stressed, adding, “BJP’s impudence is there for all to see. Every tactic has been used, including the central agencies.” Ashok Mittal, who was recently appointed as deputy leader of the BSP in place of Chadha, faced security raids earlier this month.
CM Mann clearly pointed out that the converted MPs were not popular leaders.
The opposition’s sarcasm flies
However, the leading opposition parties have found a stick with which to beat the AAP, and have not spared the BJP as well.
Punjab Congress president 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! Only MPs have left the party for now.”
SAD’s Daljit Singh Cheema described the defections as evidence of a “systemic failure of trust, internal democracy and ideological cohesion”, calling on both Kejriwal and Mann to step down from the posts of AAP president and prime minister respectively. “Punjab cannot be turned into a laboratory for political experiments,” he said.
As for the friction between Chadha and the RJD that extends to Punjab, the Bhagwant Mann-led state government recently withdrew its Z-plus security cover. The next day, the center restored security to him.
After being accused of raising only “soft issues” like the suitability of mobile phone recharges, Raghav Chadha defended his record in Punjab by sharing collections of his parliamentary speeches on issues like prices of agricultural produce, depletion of groundwater, honoring freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, and financial dues to the state from the Centre.
As an elector, He cast his vote in Anandpur Sahib in Punjab in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
