Rajya Sabha Chairman C.P. Radhakrishnan on Monday morning accepted the formal merger of seven Aam Aadmi Party MPs into the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Rajya Sabha Secretariat confirmed the move with an official notice, and the parliament website was updated accordingly — all seven names now appear under the BJP list of members.
With this, the BJP's strength in the Rajya Sabha has jumped from 107 to 113. AAP, which had ten MPs in the Upper House until last Friday, is now down to three — Sanjay Singh, N.D. Gupta, and Sant Balbir Singh.
The seven MPs who made the switch are: Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Kumar Pathak, Ashok Kumar Mittal, Harbhajan Singh, Swati Maliwal, Vikramjit Singh Sahney, and Rajinder Gupta. They resigned from AAP on Friday, April 24, and personally submitted merger documents to the Chairman the same day.
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The constitutional logic
This move was not defection — at least not in the legal sense. Under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, a group of legislators can merge with another party without attracting disqualification under the anti-defection law, provided at least two-thirds of the original party group agrees to the merger. AAP had ten Rajya Sabha MPs. Seven is 70% — comfortably above the two-thirds threshold. That's what gave them legal cover.
Raghav Chadha, speaking before the formal merger on Friday, was blunt about the calculus: "We, the 2/3rd members belonging to AAP in Rajya Sabha, exercise the provisions of the Constitution of India and merge ourselves with the BJP."
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What AAP is saying?
The party has filed a petition seeking disqualification of the seven MPs. Sanjay Singh submitted the petition to Chairman Radhakrishnan, arguing the move amounted to defection in spirit even if it cleared the numerical threshold. AAP is calling it a "constitutional fraud."
The chairman's decision — coming within days of the petition being filed — suggests he found no legal bar to accepting the merger. Whether the disqualification petition has any legs will now be tested separately.
AAP also pointed to Chadha's history, noting that he had recently deleted all his critical posts about the BJP and Prime Minister Modi from social media — a sequence that, the party argued, showed this was planned. An older video of Chadha calling the BJP a "party of goons" has since circulated widely online.
How Chadha explained the split?
Chadha described leaving AAP in strongly personal terms. He said he "did not want to be a part of their crimes" and described himself as "the right man in the wrong party." He cited a "toxic" work environment and said he had "just two options — quit politics or do positive politics."
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju welcomed the seven MPs and took a political shot in the process, saying they had bid farewell to the "Tukde-Tukde INDI Alliance."
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The Punjab angle
Punjab is where this hit AAP the hardest. Of the seven Rajya Sabha seats Punjab has in the Upper House, six are now with the BJP. Only one remains with AAP. In Delhi, of the three Rajya Sabha seats, two remain with AAP (Sanjay Singh and N.D. Gupta) and one — Swati Maliwal — is now with the BJP.
For AAP, which built its identity around clean politics and breaking the traditional party structure, losing seven of ten Rajya Sabha MPs to the very party it positioned itself against is a particularly stinging political moment. For the BJP, adding six seats to its Rajya Sabha tally without a single election brings it closer to commanding majority territory in the Upper House.
