Going, going, gone into the BJP: How Kejriwal-led AAP and Raghav Chadha had a slow-burn breakup

RAghav Chadha made arguably the biggest displace of his political vocation so far on fri, apr 24, as he walked in for a press out conference at the Constitution Club of India in New Delhi, and left a BJP man. But only after trumping the AAP, the party he'd co-founded, on numbers; and leaving his ex-boss Arvind Kejriwal in a big bind ahead of assembly elections in Punjab.Flanked by fellow Rajya Sabha MPs Sandeep Pathak and Ashok Kumar Mittal, Chadha did what many had largely seen coming for months. But in a manner that was a minor political earthquake.He announced that seven of AAP's 10 Rajya Sabha MPs — two-thirds of the party's Upper House strength — were merging with the Centre's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), invoking the constitutional provision under the Tenth Schedule that protects such a large group from disqualification."The Aam Aadmi Party, which I nurtured with my blood and sweat and to which I gave 15 years of my youth, has now completely deviated from its principles, values, and core morals," Chadha said in the first somewhat-detailed reasoning for the breakup. “The party is no longer working for the country or in the national interest, but for personal gain,” he said, only indirectly talking about the corruption allegations related to the Delhi excise (liquor sales) policy case of 2023 in which Kejriwal and 22 others were recently discharged by a trial court.Chadha, who's been MIA from the party since that scandal broke, insisted at his Friday press meet: “I am the right man in the wrong party. I repeat — the right man in the wrong party.”That was a phrase made famous for Atal Bihari Vajpayee by the Congress as the late ex-PM was seen as a moderate face who didn't quite fit in the aggressive Hindutva-driven BJP. Vajpayee denied it all his life.As for Chadha, he explained a little bit more on why he felt like a misfit in the AAP: “I am telling you the real reason as to why I distanced myself from party activities. I did not want to be a part of their crimes. I was not eligible for their friendship because I was not a part of their crime.”It was a dramatic ending to a rupture that had been building, slowly and then all at once, for the better part of two years.Trigger of April 2The proximate trigger came on April 2, 2026, when the AAP formally stripped Chadha of his post as the party's deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha, replacing him with industrialist Ashok Kumar Mittal — who, in a pointed subplot to this story, walked with Chadha into the BJP on Friday.The AAP had also written to the Rajya Sabha Secretariat asking that Chadha be denied speaking time from AAP's parliamentary quota.Chadha, a chartered accountant with a history of family business, had already been positioning himself as a middle-class and working-class leader by raising issues related to gig workers, mobile recharge validity periods, and the prices of snacks at airports.When he was removed as AAP deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha, Chadha responded the same day, at first in riddles."Don't mistake my silence for my defeat," he said in a video on X. "I am that river which becomes a flood when the time comes."By April 6, the metaphors had sharpened. He posted on Instagram that he had been gifted a book — ‘The 48 Laws of Power’ by Robert Greene — and had turned to Chapter 1: ‘Never outshine the master’.“Some books arrive exactly when they are meant to,” he wrote.Senior AAP leaders responded with aggression, and Delhi AAP chief Saurabh Bharadwaj accused Chadha of doing "soft PR" in Parliament by raising issues such as samosa prices rather than confronting the BJP government on hard political ground.Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann was asked directly whether Chadha was "compromised”. His answer was a firm “yes”.Former Delhi CM Atishi went further, citing specific instance: that Chadha had refused to sign an Opposition impeachment motion against the Chief Election Commissioner; had not raised the issue of LPG shortages during the West Asia oil crisis; and had been in London for an eye operation while AAP leaders were protesting at police stations during Kejriwal's incarceration in 2024. “Why are you so afraid of the BJP?” she asked.Chadha dismissed each allegation individually, calling the AAP attack “scripted”.The BJP, meanwhile, kept its door pointedly ajar. Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva defended Chadha's parliamentary record, dedicated an Urdu couplet to him — “Bahut mazboot rishte the, kuch kamzor logon se” (I had very strong ties, with some very weak people) — and when asked whether Chadha would join the BJP, said only: “It is up to him to decide his future.”On Friday, when ⅔ of AAP MPs in Rajya Sabha announce merging with the BJP, Sachdeva said, “This was natural.”Delhi boy with Punjab seatTo understand the rupture, it is necessary to understand the fault line that preceded it. Chadha is ethnically Punjabi but unmistakably a Delhi product — educated at Modern School, a CA who worked at Deloitte and Grant Thornton before joining the Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement in 2011 that eventually became AAP.He won an election in 2020, from the Rajendra Nagar assembly constituency in Delhi.In 2022, after AAP's landslide victory in the Punjab assembly polls, the party sent him to the Rajya Sabha from the state.Chadha, just 33 at the time, was the youngest serving Rajya Sabha member.He and Sandeep Pathak — who has also walked into the BJP with him, meaning five of AAP's six RS MPs from Punjab have switched — were credited with having engineered the Punjab victory.The reward of RS seats, however, generated resentment in Punjab. Chadha was seen as an outsider, accused of acting as a “super CM”, and the party eventually suspended one of its own Punjab MLAs, former IPS officer Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh, after he made public allegations against Chadha among other anti-AAP statements.The long withdrawalFrom 2023 onwards, Chadha progressively withdrew from active Punjab AAP affairs and from the party more broadly.This coincided with the period in which Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia faced corruption charges in Delhi — a crisis that reshaped the party's internal dynamics entirely.Chadha was in London statedly for medical reasons, at first. He met Kejriwal after his release from six months in jail, but was only a peripheral figure in AAP's 2025 Delhi assembly campaign. That was the election the party lost to the BJP after a decade in power.Since then, Kejriwal and Sisodia have focused their entire attention on Punjab, where assembly elections are due in early 2027.Chadha, meanwhile, basked in the glory of raising “middle-class issues”, and at one point nodded to a random idea online that he could form a “Gen-Z party”.What remains of AAP in the Rajya SabhaOf the party's 10 members, just three remain now with it: Sanjay Singh, Balbir Singh Seechewal, and ND Gupta.Of the seven who left, six were Punjab MPs, meaning the party now has a single Rajya Sabha representative from the state it governs, with Punjab elections barely 10 months away.AAP's response has been to call it "Operation Lotus" — the term the party uses for alleged BJP-engineered political poaching using central agencies.Sanjay Singh accused the BJP of using the ED and CBI to "create fear" and said the seven defectors had “stabbed the people of Punjab in the back”.Ashok Mittal, the industrialist who owns Lovely Professional University, had recently faced ED raids in Punjab.Kejriwal, who maintained complete public silence through the weeks of warfare with Chadha, broke it only to say that the BJP had “betrayed the people of Punjab”.He did not address Chadha, nor his accusation of “crimes” within the party. The Punjab poll campaign, however, has only just begun.