From sequestering MLAs in luxury hotels to knocking the Supreme Court's doors with disqualification petitions, come election season and parties struggle to keep their flock together.
The fear?
Their members’ party-hopping tendencies.
‘Turncoats’, ‘rebels’, ‘deserters’ – no matter how unforgiving the labels are, in recent times, defectors switching sides, have often held the fortunes of political parties in the palm of their hands across different states.
Under the infamous Aaya-Ram-Gaya-Ram doctrine, defectors had governments in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh fall like a house of cards and those in power in Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka on the tenterhooks for weeks. It was the BJP and its allies that raked in benefits or stood to benefit in all the cases.
Turncoats from one of its arch rivals, the Aam Aadmi Party, helped the BJP register a remarkable victory in Delhi’s recently concluded mayoral elections. The AAP would have been the biggest party in the house with its candidates holding the top posts had its members not decided to jump ship and join the BJP.
In December 2022, the AAP had ended 15 years of BJP rule and emerged as the winner in the MCD elections with 134 councillors. The BJP had secured 104 seats, out of the 250 seats that went for polls, at the time.
Come April 2025, the numbers looked different and the power balance tilted in favour of the BJP.
BJP’s Raja Iqbal Singh won the mayoral post securing a whopping 133 out of 142 votes. The Congress’s candidate Mandeep Singh managed to poll only eight votes. One vote was declared invalid. (Apart from the councillors, the electorate college for mayoral elections includes 14 MLAs nominated by the assembly speaker in proportion to each party’s strength, and Delhi’s seven Lok Sabha MPs and three Rajya Sabha MPs.)
Four days ahead of the mayoral polls, the AAP had announced on April 21 that it will boycott the elections. The party had then alleged that despite losing the popular mandate in the December 2022 elections, the BJP was resorting to 'backdoor’ and ‘undemocratic’ means to wrest control of the capital’s civic body.
Declaring that her party will not field candidates for the mayoral elections, AAP leader Atishi said, “To win now, we would have to indulge in the same kind of politics - breaking and buying councillors…” “We refuse to be a part of that game,” the former chief minister said.
BJP leader and Delhi CM Rekha Gupta deflected the allegations claiming that the AAP’s decision to not contest the polls proved that the party was aware of its weakening grip on the capital’s voters.
On its part, the BJP had set the wheels in motion to consolidate its numbers months before elections for the mayor’s post were announced. At least 19 AAP councillors had joined the saffron party in six months. While many were first time councillors, several had a colorful history of crossing over to the other side.
The slew of defections started back in August 2024, when five AAP councillors, namely Ram Chander (Shabad Dairy ward), Pawan Kumar (Bawana ward), Manju Nirmal (Badarpur ward), Sungandha (Tughlakabad ward) and Mamta (Harkesh Nagar ward), joined the BJP’s fold.
Not new to shifting loyalties
The BJP welcomed these defectors at an event helmed by the party’s Delhi president Virendra Sachdeva where he attributed the councillors flipping side to “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s developmental work”. Among other leaders in attendance was Arvinder Singh Lovely, who had left the Congress for the BJP just three months before in May 2024. Interestingly, the switch marked Lovely’s second stint at the BJP having left the party in 2018 for the Congress.
The BJP’s new joinees came with a past as illustrious as Lovely’s.
Like Lovely, it was councillor Ram Chander’s second stint in BJP too. Ram Chander first joined the BJP in 2020 after ending his five-year-long association with the AAP. The 58-year-old had won the Bawana assembly byelection in 2017, but the AAP denied him a ticket for the 2020 Delhi assembly polls.
“When they did not give me a ticket, I left the party and joined the BJP,” Chander told Newslaundry. However, he soon went back to AAP when he was promised a councillor ticket. In the 2022 MCD elections, Chander won the Shahbad Dairy ward, but soon split ways with the AAP again after the party denied him an assembly ticket for the 2025 Delhi state elections.
Speaking to Newslaundry, he said he was “fully dedicated towards the BJP” “irrespective of whether the party gives him a ticket in the future or not”.
While he pledges his allegiance to the BJP now, within five days of rejoining the BJP on August 25, 2024, he had left the party for AAP only to come back to the BJP quietly in a matter of days. Chander now refers to his association with the AAP a “huge mistake.”
Curiously, between his latest to-and-fro from the BJP to AAP to BJP again, he had accused the saffron party of “kidnapping” him. He had claimed that the BJP had “threatened” to use the Enforcement Directorate and Central Bureau of Investigation to “frame” him.
Chander has been with the BJP for at least five months now.
Chander is, however, not the only one who has mastered the art of switching allegiances.
Within two months of winning the Bawana ward on an AAP ticket in the 2022 Delhi MCD elections, Pawan Kumar shifted to the BJP in February 2023 ahead of a crucial meeting to elect members of the civic body’s standing committee. He claimed he left the AAP because he was feeling suffocated as the party had asked him to create disruptions during the MCD proceedings.
Kumar’s first stint lasted with the BJP for three months and he soon returned to the AAP in May 2023 only to leave it in August 2024 with Chander and others.
He told Newslaundry that the reason he left the AAP was because the party “was not doing any work at all.” “As councillors, we want to serve the people,” Kumar said. He accused the AAP of “wasting his time” though, in May 2023, he had described rejoining the party as “coming back to his family.”
Within a month of joining the BJP (for the second time), the party elevated first-time councillor Kumar as the head of the Narela zone ward committee.
But not all turncoats have received similar rewards.
‘Easier to get work done as BJP councillors’
Some claim they only switched to the BJP to serve their electors better. Speaking to Newslaundry, at least two councillors claimed that it was easier to get work from state government officials done as BJP councillors.
“As AAP councillors, we were facing a lot of problems to get even the simplest tasks like cleaning of drainage completed. But the moment I switched to the BJP, government officers started paying attention to us and I am able to get people’s work done,” said Harkesh Nagar councillor Mamata Pawan.
On leaving the AAP, the councillor claimed that “the only reason she quit was because, as the party’s councillors, the government employees were not listening to us at all”. “At the end of the day, I owe my allegiance to the people who have elected me and not the political party.”
Another first-time councillor and AAP defector, Manju Nirmal, shared similar concerns. “The government employees or the MP were not coordinating with us because I belonged to the rival party and they owed their allegiance to the BJP or LG Saxena.” Badarpur councillor Nirmal said that after joining the BJP, “all these problems are resolved and councillors even get to spend the MP funds.”
After the departure of Nirmal and Co. last August, fifteen councillors from AAP have left the party to join the BJP. Some were vocal about the crossover and the reasons they claimed that motivated the move and some chose to do so without making any waves.
While eleven councillors – Preeti (Dilshad Colony), Sarita Phogaat (Green Park), Praveen Kumar (Madanpur Khadar East), Sunita (Dwarka-C), Arti Chawla (Rajinder Nagar), Sunil Kumar Chadha (Chaukhandi Nagar), Ravinder (Baprola), Narendra Kumar (Manglapuri), Umed Singh (Said-ul-Ajaib), Rekha Rani (Bhajanpura) and Shilpa Kaur (Khayala) – switched to the BJP before the 2025 Delhi assembly elections were announced, others, like Anita Basoya (Andrews Ganj), Nikhil Chaprana (Hari Nagar), Dharamvir (RK Puram), joined the BJP post-assembly elections to form a form a “triple-engine” government. (BJP had registered a thumping victory winning 48 out of 70 MLA seats in the Delhi state polls).
Like other turncoats, many of them have claimed that problems with the AAP’s leadership led them to quit the party. Some of them even say that it wasn’t AAP’s tussle with the Lieutenant Governor’s office or the BJP government at the centre , but its own poor management that needed to be held responsible.
“For over two-and-a-half years, we did not have any budget in the MCD. How will I get people’s work done? Their tussle with the LG and the central government is not the real reason. The problem is with the party and their leadership” claimed four-time councillor Preeti.
Of the four times she has been elected as councillor, she fought independently twice, and on a Congress ticket once before joining AAP. She claims ahead of 2022 MCD elections, AAP president Arvind Kejriwal had “personally requested” her to fight elections on the party’s ticket from Dilshad Colony.
Soon after her victory, Preeti alleges she became a “victim” of internal party politics because “AAP’s leaders were insecure of her”. “I could be a competitor to them in future so they started complaining about me to the party’s senior leadership”, she said.
Mangalpuri councillor Narendra Kumar said he left AAP because he wanted to “teach the party a lesson.” The 53-year-old said he had a long list of reasons to be miffed with the party.
“During the assembly elections, they gave tickets to so many Congress leaders – the same people they used to accuse of corruption. I tried to voice all these concerns to the senior party leadership as well. I waited for Kejriwal for a month, but he did not give me time”. In January 2025, Kumar, who had joined the AAP during the 2014 anti-corruption movement and had been with the party for over a decade, joined the BJP. “I thought it was my chance to teach AAP a lesson,” he said.
Newslaundry also reached out to councillors Sugandha Bhidhuri, Sarita Phoghat, Praveen Kumar, Ravinder Solanki, Anita Basoya, Nikhil Chaprana and Dharamvir for comment. The story will be updated if they respond.
Post all the defections, the AAP now only has 114 councillors in the MCD as compared to the 134 seats in 2022. While three seats fell vacant after the councillors were elected as MLAs to the Delhi Assembly, the party lost as many as 19 councillors to the BJP in defections and one to Congress. (Two independent councillors and a Congress councillor also joined the party in between).
In the opposite camp, BJP now has 116 councillors, up from the 104 seats it had in 2022. While nine BJP seats fell vacant after eight councillors were elected to the Delhi Assembly and one councillor became a Lok Sabha MP, two independent councillors joined the party, the party largely owes the increase in numbers not to merit or to votes, but to the shifting loyalties of its rivals.
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