New Delhi, April 24: The mass exodus of the Aam Aadmi Party Rajya Sabha members on Friday was the breaking of a faultline that was drawn back in 2024, when Swati Maliwal, one of the seven who quit, alleged physical assault at then Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s residence.
On May 13, 2024, she accused a close aide of Kejriwal of thrashing her at the chief minister’s residence.
The rift broadened, veritably, unfixably, earlier this month, when the AAP ousted Raghav Chadha from the post of the party’s deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha.
Even before their exit on Friday, murmurs were rife that their association in the party may not last long.
Their colleagues in the party and in the Rajya Sabha, Ashok Mittal, Harbhajan Singh, Rajinder Gupta, Vikram Sahney and Sandeep Pathak, seldom expressed their dissent publicly, and for this very reason, their quitting came as a general surprise.
Mittal’s decision to quit AAP came close on the heels of Enforcement Directorate (ED) raids at his residential and business premises in Punjab, related to a Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) case.
AAP leader Sanjay Singh blamed the mass desertion on the BJP’s “Operation Lotus”.
In a press conference he held soon after the exodus, Singh charged that the seven MPs quit the party under fear of action by the ED and CBI.
Chadha, a prominent face in the AAP all along, had all but fallen out of favour with the senior leadership since the arrest of the party’s national convener Arvind Kejriwal in 2024.
After Maliwal, he was the second AAP Rajya Sabha MP, whose fallout with the top leadership spilled out in the public domain. Chadha was questioned by the party about his absence when Kejriwal was arrested in connection with an excise policy case in March 2024. His silence on political matters, absence from party events, and abstention from questioning the Centre in the Upper House were also talked about.
The AAP’s top leaders accused him of distancing himself from the party after the Kejriwal-led Delhi government got embroiled in the excise policy case. He was accused of alienating the party when it hit a rough patch, as one after the other, Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh, were arrested in the case.
The flashpoint arrived with the party removing him from the post of AAP deputy leader in the Lok Sabha earlier this month. (PTI)
