Days after he had a public falling out with the Aam Aadmi Party, Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha left the party he co-founded, and “merged” with the Centre’s ruling BJP. The verb ‘merged’ is important here for a key reason. Because, had he quit alone, he would have lost his Rajya Sabha membership under the anti-defection law.
Under the Constitution’s Tenth Schedule, a member of the Rajya Sabha is exempt from anti-defection disqualification only if two-thirds of his/her party’s legislators together agree to merge with another party.
Chadha underlined this in his post on X: “We, two-thirds of the Members of Parliament belonging to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Rajya Sabha, will exercise the provisions of the Constitution of India and merge with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).”
AAP has 10 Rajya Sabha MPs, of which seven are now gone, announced Chadha. He listed himself, plus Ashok Kumar Mittal who had recently been made deputy leader of the AAP in the Upper House of Parliament in Chadha’s place; Sandeep Pathak, Harbhajan Singh, Rajinder Gupta, Vikramjit Singh Sahney, and Swati Maliwal.
The three that remain are Sanjay Singh, Balbir Singh Seechewal, and ND Gupta.
Big meaning for Punjab
Of these seven who’ve switched sides, six are MPs from Punjab, elected in 2022 after the AAP gained a brute majority in the Vidhan Sabha elections there.
That starkly means the AAP now has just one of its Punjab Rajya Sabha MPs remaining: environmentalist spiritual guru Balbir Singh Seechewal.
This is a major setback for the state’s ruling party as the Punjab assembly elections are barely 10 months away.
All of them have six-year Rajya Sabha terms until April 2028.
The seventh to quit is Delhi’s Swati Maliwal, who has been publicly at odds with the AAP leadership since 2024 but did not quit as she would’ve lost her membership. The party did not sack her as that would’ve meant she could remain Rajya Sabha member nonetheless. Maliwal needed a group of ⅔ of the AAP members in the House; that now became possible as Raghav Chadha and others too came together to switch together. Maliwal’s term is until 2030.
Who are the ones who quit, and those who stay
Brief bios of the AAP Rajya Sabha members to have switched to the BJP reveal that many of these are essentially non-politicians or businesspeople.
Raghav Chadha and Swati Maliwal are activists who were part of the AAP’s founding team in 2012 after taking part in the Anna Hazare-frontfaced anti-corruption movement.
Sandeep Pathak remained the party’s national general secretary, and was credited, along with Chadha, for the Punjab win. He was, however, seen as an “outsider” when he was sent to the Rajya Sabha from the state.
Chadha, ethnically a Punjabi but actually a Delhiite, was also seen as someone from outside being rewarded by the party at the cost of local Punjabis.
Former Team India cricketer Harbhajan Singh remains a non-political personality while the party sought to project that a hero from Punjab’s politically impkrtant Doaba region — Jalandhar to be precise — was being given respect with a Rajya Sabha seat. He has remained largely aloof, though, on political issues, barring the occasional social-media spat over nationalistic issues.
Man who replaced Chadha also goes
Industrialist Ashok Kumar Mittal, who was named the AAP RS deputy leader in place of Chadha — the public breaking point between Chadha and AAP — has also gone to the saffron party with him. Mittal, founder of Lovely Professional University (LPU) and a sweets and car sales agency empire, was recently raided by central probe agency ED over his sources of income. The party had called the raids a pressure tactic.
Vikramjit Singh Sahney is known as an industrialist and philanthropist, whose base has largely remained Delhi but he is active in social projects in Punjab.
Rajinder Gupta of the Trident Group of Ludhiana is yet another businessman. He was elected in a bye-election to the Rajya Sabha barely six months ago, in October 2025, after another industralist Sanjeev Arora moved to the state assembly and became a minister in Bhagwant Mann’s regime.
Sandeep Pathak is an IITian-turned-activist-politician like party boss Arvind Kejriwal, and was incharge of Punjab.
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