Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha posted a video on Instagram on Monday, breaking his silence over his decision to leave the Aam Aadmi Party and merge with the Bhartiya Janata Party, alleging that the party had been captured by "corrupt and compromised people" and that he had no choice but to move on.
"I became a founding member of a political party - a party to which I gave 15 years of my prime youth," Chadha said in the video. "I nurtured this party with my blood, sweat, and hard work."
"But today, this party is no longer the same party it once was. Today, there is a toxic work environment in this party. You are stopped from working, stopped from speaking in Parliament," he claimed.
The video came three days after Chadha, along with six other AAP Rajya Sabha MPs — Sandeep Pathak, Ashok Mittal, Harbhajan Singh, Swati Maliwal, Rajinder Gupta and Vikramjit Singh Sahney — announced their merger with the BJP at a press conference in New Delhi on Friday. The seven MPs constitute exactly two-thirds of AAP's 10-member Rajya Sabha strength — the constitutional threshold required to execute a valid merger and sidestep the anti-defection law.
In the video, Chadha laid out the three options he said he had weighed before making his decision. "The first was to quit politics altogether. The second was to remain in the same party and try to fix things, which did not happen. And the third option was to take my energy and experience forward and practice positive politics by joining another platform, another political party."
He defended the collective nature of the move as proof the decision was not personal or impulsive.
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"One person can be wrong. Two people can be wrong. But seven people cannot all be wrong," he said. "And what about the countless educated and erudite people who had once joined this party with a dream, but later left it — can all of them be wrong too?"
Chadha also addressed supporters who feared his priorities would change under the BJP. "I want to assure them that I will continue to raise your problems with the same energy, passion, and commitment," he said.
The defection has drawn sharp backlash online. Within 24 hours of the switch, Chadha lost close to 1 million Instagram followers, with past videos of him sharply criticising the BJP resurfacing and fuelling accusations of ideological inconsistency.
The AAP accused the BJP of engineering "Operation Lotus" to dismantle the party's parliamentary presence.
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