In less than a week, Raghav Chadha went from being the Aam Aadmi Party’s deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha to the most publicly attacked MP – stripped of his position, barred from speaking in Parliament from the party’s quota; His colleagues accused him of being a “compromiser” and of being in league with the Centre’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Two questions are now dominating political conversations: Will Chadha formally switch to the BJP, as AAP leaders increasingly claim? If he does so, or is expelled, will he retain his seat in the Rajya Sabha?
Neither of them has a simple answer.
In addition, there is the Punjab angle.
Chadha’s role, in his own words and those of AAP
The immediate overview of the ramifications was: AAP wrote to the Rajya Sabha Secretariat on April 2, replacing Chadha as the party’s deputy leader in the upper house of Parliament with fellow Punjab MP, industrialist Ashok Mittal.
The party has 10 members in the Rajya Sabha, seven from Punjab and three from Delhi. In the Lok Sabha, there are three MPs, all from Punjab.
She requested the RS Secretariat not to allocate speaking time to Raghav Chadha from AAP quota.
Chadha, 37, responded the same day, but with riddles and Dialogues at the beginning. He said in a video clip posted on the “X” website: “Do not consider my silence my defeat,” adding: “I am that river that becomes a flood when the time comes.”
His party’s senior leaders have become combative in turn – a style for which the RJD has been known since the emergence of Arvind Kejriwal and the founding group, including Chadha, of the anti-corruption movement in 2011-12.
Delhi AAP president Saurabh Bharadwaj Chadha was accused of doing “soft PR” or public relations/propaganda in Parliament by raising less obvious issues like food prices at airports and… timelines for rapid trade delivery, rather than confronting the BJP-led central government on a more difficult political terrain.
“Since a small party has a very limited time in Parliament, if someone raises the samosa issue during that period, it is important to raise the bigger issues for the country,” Bharadwaj said.
Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, where Chadha holds the MP position, responded directly on whether Chadha “Bargaining.” He said emphatically: “Yes!”
“If there is a partisan stance on any issue, like in Gujarat where cases were registered against 160 AAP volunteers; instead of talking about those issues, if someone raises issues related to samosa prices, pizza delivery, wouldn’t you suspect that the person is talking from another side, or from another station?” said Mann, the comedian-turned-politician.
Atishi, the former Delhi chief minister, cited specific acts of omission in Chadha’s record. She said that Chad refused to sign a memorandum of impeachment against the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar – a cross-party backed opposition initiative – did not raise the issue of LPG shortage even when the party asked him to do so amid the US-Iran war and the West Asian oil crisis.
“Why are you so afraid of the BJP? Why are you afraid to question PM Modi?” she asked in a video, pointedly adding that when AAP leaders were protesting at police stations across Delhi while Arvind Kejriwal was imprisoned for nearly six months in 2024, “I was in London because you had an eye operation.”
“A lot of opposition leaders got scared and went to the BJP. Raghav Chadha is likely to be next,” she later said.
Chadha denied each claim individually. Regarding the withdrawal demand, he said: “I challenge you to mention even one case when the opposition decided to withdraw and I did not support it.” on Impeachment motion: “Only 50 signatures were required out of 105 opposition MPs in the Senate. When six or seven AAP MPs did not sign, why should I be singled out?” He did not mention the names of these AAP MPs.
He described the entire AAP attack on him as “scripted”.
“Same language, same words, same allegations. This is not a coincidence, but a coordinated attack,” he said on Saturday, quoting a line from the Bollywood movie “Dhurandhar”: “Ghayal hoon isiliye ghatak hoon” (I am wounded, therefore I am dangerous).
Regarding his record in Punjab specifically, Chadha on Sunday released a video compilation of his interventions in the Rajya Sabha, listing the issues he said he had raised. These included the demand for a legal guarantee of the minimum support price for agricultural products; Paying attention to groundwater depletion; Call for Bharat Ratna by freedom fighter Bhagat Singh; Dues owed by the Center to Punjab; and expansion of the Kartarpur Sahib corridor. He also visited Punjab during Devastating floods last year.
“Punjab is not a talking point for me. It is my home, my duty, my soil and my soul,” he said. He described the video as a “small trailer,” adding, “Photo Abhi paki hai“, to say that the real thing will come later.
His Instagram post on the issue was admired by film star Priyanka Chopra, who happens to be his wife’s cousin, actress Parineeti Chopra, and a prominent film star in Punjab. Sonam Bajwa, outside the political sphere.
AAP’s national convener, Arvind Kejriwal, has maintained complete silence on the issue, as of April 6 evening.
Fault line between Delhi and Punjab
The tensions between Chadha and the AAP leadership have deeper roots than some unsigned proposals or “soft issues” such as samosa prices and validity periods of prepaid recharges.
Although a Punjabi, Chaddha is a Delhi boy educated in the Modern School; A chartered accountant, he worked at Deloitte and Grant Thornton before joining the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement in 2011 which eventually became the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
He won his only direct election in 2020, from Rajendra Nagar constituency in the Delhi Assembly elections, with more than 57% of the votes. Two years after he became an MLA, the party sent him to the Rajya Sabha from Punjab after the AAP’s landslide win there in 2022. Chadha was credited with helping engineer that win as the party’s state co-incharge.
This promotion generated some discontent in Punjab, and he faced allegations that he was acting as a “super CM” while being seen as an outsider. The party even suspended its MLA, former IPS officer Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh, in 2024 after he made public allegations against Chadha among other attacks on the party.
Chadha appears to have withdrawn from the AAP’s active affairs in Punjab during 2023-24, and from the party more broadly, at a time when Kejriwal and his second-in-command Manish Sisodia have faced corruption charges in Delhi.
He met Kejriwal after his release from prison, which came after six months in prison, but he was only a marginal presence in the AAP’s 2025 Delhi Assembly campaign – a battle the party lost to the BJP after a decade in power.
Since then, Kejriwal and Sisodia have focused intensely on Punjab, where elections scheduled for early 2027 are key for the party because it is the only state that has a government, or is strong at all, outside of Delhi.
What the BJP said, and what it did not do
The BJP’s response to the incident has been calibrated. Its Delhi unit chief, Virendra Sachdeva, termed the AAP’s move to prevent Chadha from speaking in Parliament as “highly objectionable”, even defending his record as an MP. Sash said Deva: “Kejriwal uses people first and then gets rid of them.” He even dedicated a couplet or couplet in Urdu to Chadha: “Bahut mazbut rishti, kuch kamzor login seroughly translates to, “I had very strong relationships with some very vulnerable people.”
Asked specifically if Chadha would join the BJP, Sachdeva said: “It is up to him to decide his future.”
Punjab BJP chief Sunil Jakhar also used this moment to take aim at AAP, the ruling party in his state. He said in an interview with Tribune Chadha’s episode “signals the beginning of the end for AAP”. He has not made an offer to Chad as such, though it remains to be seen whether Chad is even looking for a political move at the state level in Punjab, where he faces “Delhiwala” or “outsider” taunts from outside his party already, and now from within as well.
The BJP’s door is clearly ajar, but no one inside has extended a hand yet – at least not publicly.
But AAP pointed to Chadha cleaning up social media as a big hint at his next move. All posts critical of Modi and the BJP have reportedly been deleted from his X account, according to screenshots shared by Delhi AAP chief Bharadwaj.
The parliamentary seat is safe for now
Whatever Chadha’s political intentions, his constitutional position is currently secure. His term in the Rajya Sabha lasts until 2028, and the RJD cannot simply remove him from Parliament. She could remove him from his internal party positions, which she has already done.
under In the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, which covers the anti-defection law introduced by the Fifty-Second Amendment in 1985, a Rajya Sabha member can lose his or her seat only in two cases: by voluntarily giving up party membership, or by defying the party whip when voting in the House.
Courts have held over the years that a “voluntary relinquishment of membership” does not have to be a formal resignation. It can also be inferred from behavior, such as attending rival party rallies, campaigning for another party, or making public statements that constitute a sustained break from the party.
There is a precedent in 2017, when two Rajya Sabha MPs from the Bihar-based BJP ally JD(U), Sharad Yadav and Ali Anwar, were disqualified by the RSP president after the JD(U) cited their attendance at rallies organized by opposition parties as evidence of their defection.
But the threshold for this interpretation is high, and ultimate authority is largely discretionary.
The decision on any disqualification petition lies with the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, a position held by the Vice President of India, currently CP Radhakrishnan. The Constitution does not set a deadline for a decision even if one party files a case under the anti-defection law.
In 2023, the Supreme Court said the cases would be resolved within three months. But the law has not been amended to provide such a schedule.
There is a similar precedent in the case of AAP’s Chadha itself. She is a Rajya Sabha MP Swati Maliwal made serious public allegations against Kejriwal and his personal secretary, and the matter reached court; Yet she remains a member to this day, and even continues to publicly attack the AAP leadership.
