In a striking coincidence, if there could be one in politics, Arvind Kejriwal and Ashok Mittal parted ways on the same day — and in opposite directions.
On April 24, Kejriwal moved out of the Lutyens’ Delhi bungalow that Mittal had been allotted as Rajya Sabha MP, and which he’d given to the AAP to live in since last year. In a post on X, Kejriwal said the Centre had now allotted him a bungalow following court directions on account of his position as the national convenor of the AAP. “I have now shifted to that house with my family,” Kejriwal said.
Within hours, Mittal quit the AAP and joined the Centre’s ruling BJP, dealing a severe blow to a party chief who had once personally recruited him into its fold.
Mittal was not alone. He was among seven AAP Rajya Sabha MPs — including Raghav Chadha, Swati Maliwal, Harbhajan Singh, Sandeep Pathak, Rajinder Gupta and Vikramjit Sahney — who “merged” into the BJP on Thursday, in the most consequential single-day exodus in the party’s history.
Kejriwal had reportedly called the MPs to his home on Friday evening in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the walkout, but that meeting never happened.
Kejriwal’s first public response was characteristically combative. “BJP has jolted Punjabis,” he said, framing the defections as an external conspiracy rather than an internal collapse, and referring to the only state where the party is in power and faces elections early next year.
Mittal was a big part of the AAP’s Punjab story.
It was Kejriwal who brought Mittal — the founder of Lovely Professional University and a prominent Punjab businessman whose family started with a famous laddoo shop by the name Lovely Sweets in Jalandhar — into the AAP, and gave him a Rajya Sabha berth in 2022.
When Kejriwal resigned as Delhi CM in September 2024 following his release on bail in the excise policy case, he was suddenly without a home. He vacated the official CM’s residence at 6 Flagstaff Road, long targeted by the BJP as the ‘Sheesh Mahal’ for ornate renovations.
In a video message in October 2024, Mittal said: “When [Kejriwal] resigned as the chief minister, I came to know that he had no place to stay. I invited him to be my guest at my Delhi residence, and it brings me great joy that he has accepted my request.”
Kejriwal moved into Mittal’s official MP bungalow at 5 Ferozeshah Road, near the AAP headquarters, along with his family. He would live there for a little over a year.
What happened in between: ED raid in focus
Before the arrangement unravelled, came an Enforcement Directorate (ED) raid.
In April 2026, barely days after AAP elevated Mittal to replace a rebellious Raghav Chadha as the party’s deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha, central agency ED’s teams conducted searches at multiple locations linked to Mittal, including his residence and the LPU campus in Punjab.
The raids were linked to alleged financial irregularities involving business entities associated with the Lovely Group.
Kejriwal and AAP’s Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann called the raids politically motivated. The BJP defended them as anti-corruption action.
Within about a week, the exits came.
The chain of events thus traces back to early April, when AAP stripped Chadha of his deputy leader position in the Rajya Sabha and handed the role to Mittal.
Chadha, boxed in by anti-defection law — which requires at least two-thirds of a party’s legislators to agree to a merger to avoid disqualification — quietly reached out to other disgruntled MPs.
By the time the group moved, there were enough of them to clear that constitutional threshold.
Kejriwal on Friday vacated Mittal’s house and shifted to a Type-VII government bungalow in Lodhi Estate, the residence allotted to him in his capacity as head of a national party.
Mittal quit the party the same evening.
On Saturday, Delhi AAP chief Saurabh Bharadwaj drew a link between ED and Mittal’s exit. In a post on X, he said, “AAP was never about those 7 MPs of Rajya Sabha, AAP is about volunteers who never asked for even a councillor ticket and yet gave up all they had — career, family, studies. Big netas with deep pockets can be scared by ED, AAP Volunteers can’t be. We must keep asking Questions.”
Punjab situation for AAP
This also means that the AAP has now lost seven of its 10 RS MPs. Six of those who left were elected from Punjab, as the AAP got all seven seats from the state shortly after its landslide win in the assembly elections of 2022.
There had been an uproar in the state over “outsiders” like Chadha and Sandeep Pathak, both AAP strategists; and apolitical people or wealthy industrialists being chosen.
The current rupture arrives in a context notably different from AAP’s previous waves of internal churn. The party had weathered ideological exits by co-founders like Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav in 2015, and political fallouts with Kumar Vishwas and Kapil Mishra thereafter; and yet kept winning elections.
It swept 67 seats in Delhi in 2015, 63 in 2020, and 92 of 117 seats in Punjab in 2022.
But this exodus comes after AAP lost Delhi in 2025 — its home turf — winning just 22 seats to the BJP’s 48. And Punjab is set to vote in around 10 months. Mann has labelled the rebels “traitors”. When he asked if the party had made wrong choices to begin with, he said these people were chosen for RS seats as they were eminent in their fields. “If there’s a machine that can read minds, let me know, and if I can order it from Amazon!” he quipped on Friday.
Chadha, flanked by Pathak and Mittal, said the party was no longer aligned with its principles, and they were impressed with PM Narendra Modi’s work. Mittal nodded along, but shared no details on why he was quitting; and later took BJP membership with the other MPs.
Article source: hindustantimes.com
