AAP’s Rajya Sabha Implosion: 7 out of 10 MPs Merge with BJP…..by KBS Sidhu

Punjab Government: Shaken, but Not Stirred

On 24 April 2026, three Rajya Sabha MPs elected on the Aam Aadmi Party ticket — Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, and Ashok Mittal — stepped before the cameras to announce that two-thirds of AAP’s legislative party in the Upper House had resolved to merge with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

They were not alone. Swati Maliwal, Rajinder Gupta, Harbhajan Singh, and Vikramjit Singh Sahney had, they said, signed the requisite documents, which had already been submitted that morning to the office of the Chairman, Rajya Sabha. Seven out of ten — 70 per cent — comfortably above the two-thirds threshold required under the Tenth Schedule to the Constitution.

The Constitutional Position

The Tenth Schedule is unambiguous on the point. An MP who voluntarily gives up party membership is ordinarily disqualified for defection. But where at least two-thirds of a legislature party’s members agree to merge with another political party, no disqualification attaches — either to those who join the merger or to those who choose to remain. Seven out of ten satisfies this threshold on a plain numerical reading.

The three dissenters — Sanjay Singh, Narain Dass Gupta, and Balbir Singh Seechewal — are equally shielded.

Whether the merger is legally valid — whether the two-thirds count is genuine and the signatories acted voluntarily — will be decided in the first instance by the Vice-President of India in his capacity as Chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

AAP will almost certainly challenge the merger before the Chairman and thereafter before the constitutional courts. The submission of papers is the beginning of the process, not its conclusion. But if the documentary record holds, the numerical defence is formidable.

The Men Who Walked Out

Raghav Chadha’s estrangement from Arvind Kejriwal had long been visible. His complaint that the party had systematically denied him microphone time in the Rajya Sabha — a “coordinated campaign of white lies,” in his own phrase — was aired publicly in the days preceding the press conference.

He described himself as “the right man in the wrong party.” He brings to the BJP media fluency and constitutional articulateness rare in a politician of his years.

Sandeep Pathak was the principal architect of AAP’s 2022 Punjab sweep. He understood the state’s political grammar at the grassroots with a precision that few in the national leadership could match. After his election to the Rajya Sabha, he was relieved of Punjab duties and dispatched to manage Gujarat — a sideways move widely read as marginalisation.

His departure deprives AAP not merely of a Rajya Sabha seat but of irreplaceable institutional memory on Punjab. He knows precisely which levers to pull in which constituency. His value to the BJP is not numerical — it is strategic.

Ashok Mittal, founder-chancellor of Lovely Professional University and a widely respected industrialist from Jalandhar, was never a conventional political figure. His induction into the Rajya Sabha rested on institutional stature and philanthropic standing, not ideological affinity with AAP.

ED search operations at his premises earlier this month added a layer of pressure that rendered his continued association untenable.

He brings to the BJP financial credibility and the formidable network that LPU commands across Punjab’s aspirational middle class.

The Broader Cohort

Swati Maliwal’s rupture with Kejriwal is neither new nor ambiguous; her presence in the merger cohort is its least surprising element. Vikramjit Singh Sahney, Delhi-centric in orientation and long associated with the late Arun Jaitley’s BJP circle, was always an improbable fit within AAP’s Punjab-anchored identity.

Harbhajan Singh, though never openly rebellious, was conspicuously absent from the party’s orchestrated protests in Parliament — a silence that, in retrospect, spoke louder than any public statement.

Rajinder Gupta’s trajectory is instructive in a different way. He entered the Rajya Sabha only recently, elected in a by-election to fill the residual term — running to the first half of 2028 — vacated when Sanjeev Arora resigned his seat to contest the Ludhiana (West) assembly by-election.

Arora won that election and was inducted into the Bhagwant Mann Cabinet, a promotion that underscored AAP’s confidence in his utility at the state level. Gupta therefore carries into the BJP not merely a vote but a Rajya Sabha seat with over two years still to run.

What It Means — and What It Does Not

Let the immediate arithmetic be stated plainly. Seven additional members do not hand the BJP a two-thirds majority in the Rajya Sabha, nor do they constitute any imminent threat to the Bhagwant Mann government, which commands a comfortable majority in the Vidhan Sabha. The Punjab Government is shaken — but it is not stirred. No floor is about to collapse.

What has collapsed, however, is AAP’s parliamentary standing. From ten members to three — if the merger withstands legal challenge — is a decimation of Upper House weight that will take years to rebuild, if it can be rebuilt at all. AAP will respond in the only register available to a party publicly deserted: it will call the departing MPs traitors, coerced agents, and BJP plants. That is the grammar of wounded political parties. It does not alter the facts on the ground.

The Battle for Punjab: Now Uphill

For Arvind Kejriwal, already navigating the legal and political turbulence of post-bail politics in Delhi, 24 April 2026 opens one more front on which the party must fight. Punjab was the national foothold that was supposed to sustain AAP’s ambitions beyond Delhi. That foothold, today, looks considerably less secure.

The Vidhan Sabha elections are due in February 2027. The BJP’s national president announced only yesterday that the party will contest Punjab alone — a declaration of intent that signals both confidence and a strategic decision to own the anti-AAP space outright rather than share it with allies.

It is a high-stakes call. But the seven MPs who have just crossed over materially strengthen the hand that is making it.

The opposition landscape offers AAP no easy comfort. The Congress, the only party with the structural depth to mount a serious challenge, is consumed by internal warfare. Sukhbir Singh Badal, attempting to rehabilitate the Shiromani Akali Dal after the catastrophe of 2022, is increasingly challenged by a rival faction within his own party; his grip on the Akali organisation remains contested and his personal credibility continues to carry the weight of the sacrilege cases. Neither the Congress nor the Akali Dal is, at this moment, a coherent fighting force.

Reinforcements from the Opponent’s Camp

Into this fractured opposition landscape, the BJP now introduces reinforcements of genuine political weight. Raghav Chadha brings media fluency and the ability to dominate the constitutional and governance discourse in ways that the BJP’s Punjab unit has conspicuously lacked.

Sandeep Pathak brings something rarer still: hands-on knowledge of AAP’s own organisational architecture in Punjab, its cadre networks, its pressure points, and its vulnerabilities. He is, in the most precise sense, a man who knows where the bodies are buried.

Add to this the financial dimension. Ashok Mittal’s LPU network, Rajinder Gupta’s industrial standing, and Vikramjit Singh Sahney’s business connections collectively bring to the BJP’s Punjab apparatus a depth of local financial resource that supplements whatever the central party machinery can deploy.

Elections in Punjab are not won on ideas alone; they are won on organisation, outreach, and resources sustained over months at the ground level. The privy purses, so to speak, have changed hands.

Punjab February 2027

Retaining power in Punjab in February 2027 was already a challenge for AAP. The anti-incumbency arithmetic that swept it to a historic majority in 2022 cuts both ways: the higher the crest, the steeper the possible correction.

Governance delivery has been uneven; the drug crisis remains unresolved; the fiscal position is strained. AAP goes into the election year having lost, in a single morning, seven of its ten Rajya Sabha MPs, its most articulate parliamentary voice, its most experienced Punjab political strategist, and a tranche of financial and institutional muscle it cannot easily replace. The battle for retaining Punjab has become more than incrementally difficult. It has become, for the first time, genuinely uphill.

April 24, 2026