Former Congress leader Amrinder Singh Lovely joined Bhartiya Janata Party in Delhi on May 4. The development comes days after he resigned from the post of Delhi president of the grand old party.
Lovely resigned as the party’s Delhi unit chief, citing the alliance with the AAP as one of the reasons. He said the Delhi Congress unit was against the alliance with the AAP but the party high command went ahead with it.
In his resignation letter sent to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Lovely also said that all unanimous decisions taken by the senior Delhi unit leaders have been “unilaterally vetoed” by AICC Delhi in-charge Deepak Babria.
He, along with four former Congress leaders, joined the BJP in the presence of Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri. The four others who joined the party include former Congress MLAs who had recently left the party — Rajkumar Chauhan, Neeraj Basoya, Naseeb Singh — and Delhi youth Congress chief Amit Malik.
“Former DUSU President Shri Amit Malik and former Delhi MLAs, Arvinder Singh Lovely, Rajkumar Chauhan, Neeraj Basoya and Naseeb Singh, join the BJP at party headquarters in New Delhi,” BJP posted on X (formally Twitter).
Lovely was appointed as the Delhi Congress chief in August last year. He resigned from the Congress in 2017 and joined the BJP but returned to the party within a year.
Lovely also criticised Congress North East Delhi candidate Kanhaiya Kumar for praising Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who has been lodged in jail in a money laundering case.
“The candidate from North-East Delhi has also been giving media bytes falsely praising the Delhi CM, in direct contravention of the party line and the local party workers’ beliefs,” he said, adding that Kanhaiya endorsed the “false propaganda of AAP in regard to the supposed works done by them in education, health, road and electricity sectors.”
Lovely said the announcement of the candidature of Kanhaiya Kumar and Udit Raj, who is contesting from the North West Delhi seat, was not taken well by Congress leaders and workers, who consider them as “outsiders”.
In the 2019 elections, the Congress had fielded Lovely against BJP’s Gautam Gambhir and AAP’s Atishi from the East Delhi constituency. This time, he did not get a ticket as the Congress is contesting on 3 seats as part of the alliance with the AAP.
Article source: businesstoday.in
