Senior AAP Lawmaker Raghav Chadha Breaks From Party, Leads Six Rajya Sabha MPs Into BJP as AAP Cries Foul
The announcement came at a press conference in the Indian capital, where Chadha stood alongside fellow MPs Sandeep Pathak and Ashok Mittal and read out what amounted to a formal political obituary for his relationship with AAP founder Arvind Kejriwal and the party's current leadership.
"The AAP, which I nurtured with my blood and sweat, and gave 15 years of my youth to, has deviated from its principles, values and core morals," Chadha said, adding that he had come to feel like "the right man in the wrong party." He went further, accusing AAP's leadership of abandoning public service in favor of personal interest. "Now this party does not work in the interest of the nation but for its personal benefits," he said.
The other MPs who joined the defection are former cricketer Harbhajan Singh, Swati Maliwal, Rajinder Gupta, and Vikram Sahni, in addition to Pathak and Mittal. Several of them represent Punjab, the state where AAP holds government and where the political fallout from Friday's events is expected to be sharpest.
The decision to invoke constitutional merger provisions was deliberate and calculated. By acting as a group that fulfills the two-thirds majority condition listed in the Tenth Schedule of India's Constitution, the departing MPs managed to retain their parliamentary seats, shielding themselves from disqualification under anti-defection laws. Had they acted individually, each would have faced the near-certain loss of their seat.
The roots of Friday's split, however, run considerably deeper than a single press conference. Tensions between Chadha and the AAP leadership had been building visibly for weeks. Earlier this month, the party stripped Chadha of his position as deputy leader of its Rajya Sabha group, installing Ashok Mittal in his place. Chadha responded publicly in a video message on social media platform X, saying the move was a direct attempt by the party leadership to prevent him from speaking on the floor of Parliament. "I am silenced, not defeated," he said at the time, challenging the party to explain whether raising public issues in Parliament was a crime. The fact that Mittal, the very man placed above Chadha just weeks earlier, was standing beside him at Friday's press conference announcing their joint departure underlined just how comprehensively the internal situation had collapsed.
AAP was quick to fire back. Senior party MP Sanjay Singh alleged that central investigative agencies were being weaponized to pressure and destabilize AAP, particularly targeting the party's Punjab government. Singh invoked the phrase "Operation Lotus," a term AAP has used for years to describe what it characterizes as the BJP's strategy of engineering political defections through a combination of investigative pressure and inducements. "Operation Lotus is being executed on the Punjab government. The ED and CBI are being used to execute this Operation Lotus," Singh told reporters, calling the departing MPs "traitors" and adding that the people of Punjab would never forget them.
The BJP has consistently rejected Operation Lotus accusations as the political grievances of a party that cannot retain its own members.
Senior Congress leader Ashok Gehlot also weighed in on Friday, accusing the BJP of "murdering democracy" and engaging in what he described as "washing machine" politics, a reference to the allegation that the BJP uses investigative agencies to clean the records of politicians willing to switch sides. Gehlot pointed specifically to the fact that Ashok Mittal, the man AAP had just elevated to replace Chadha, had reportedly been subjected to a government agency raid before turning around and joining the defection.
The broader context matters here. AAP built its entire political identity on the promise of clean, principled governance. Chadha's accusations that the party had abandoned those very values, coming from one of its most prominent young faces, strike at the heart of the AAP brand. For Sanjay Singh and the party's remaining leadership, the challenge is not just arithmetical but narrative. They must simultaneously argue that the defectors are BJP-coerced traitors while also explaining why some of their most senior parliamentary voices chose to leave.
For the BJP, the gains are both practical and political. The addition of seven Rajya Sabha MPs strengthens its numbers in the upper house and allows it to showcase a steady stream of opposition politicians who have chosen to join its ranks, reinforcing the ruling party's argument that it represents the dominant direction of Indian politics.
As of Friday evening, the formal process of parliamentary merger remained underway, with further clarifications expected from both the Rajya Sabha Secretariat and AAP's remaining leadership in the days ahead. The situation is developing.