Not Lovely optics for Congress-AAP in Delhi as DPCC chief Arvinder Singh resigns

Already facing a tough electoral battle against the BJP across Delhi’s seven Lok Sabha seats, the Congress and its ally, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), plunged into a new crisis on Sunday (April 28) with the resignation of Arvinder Singh Lovely as chief of the Congress’s Delhi unit. In his resignation letter to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Lovely has red-flagged a slew of issues which had, so far, been confined to Delhi’s political grapevine but have now become potent electoral ammunition for the BJP.

Kharge, it is learnt, has accepted Lovely’s resignation “with immediate effect” though no formal announcement has been made by the party of who would replace its rebel Delhi unit chief with less than a month to go before the seven Lok Sabha constituencies of the national capital go to polls on May 25. Congress insiders told The Federal that the party may also initiate disciplinary proceedings against Lovely. Some Delhi unit leaders have cautioned the central leadership against expelling Lovely, a former four-term MLA and prominent Sikh face of the Congress in Delhi.

Why Lovely quit

Lovely, who has maintained that his resignation is “only from the post of the DPCC president and not from the party” has, primarily, pitched his rebellion on three planks – firstly, his inability to work with Deepak Babaria, the Congress’s Delhi in-charge, secondly, the Congress central leadership’s decision to field “outsiders” Kanhaiya Kumar and Udit Raj from the North East Delhi and North West Delhi constituencies, respectively, and lastly, statements by Kanhaiya which “undermine the achievements of the (erstwhile) Sheila Dikshit government” and “give a clean chit to Arvind Kejriwal and the AAP in various scams”.

For the Congress, tackling the salvos fired by Lovely won’t be easy. Though many Congress leaders question the timing of the resignation and Lovely’s political motivations behind it – there has been heady speculation over the past few days that he may re-join the BJP, which he had briefly joined in 2017 before returning to the Congress – few deny that the concerns he has raised aren’t real.

It is common knowledge that Congress’s decisions to ally with the AAP in Delhi and then field Kanhaiya and Udit as candidates for two of the three constituencies the party got as part of the seat-sharing deal with Kejriwal had not gone down well with most senior Delhi Congress leaders.

'Outsiders' vs 'Old Loyalists'

The AAP has grown in Delhi at the Congress’s expense and until the INDIA bloc began to take shape, Kejriwal and his colleagues had been trenchant critics of the Grand Old Party. Likewise, many of the Congress’s Delhi leaders – Ajay Maken, Sandeep Dikshit, Anil Chaudhary and Lovely himself, to name just a few – who saw their political ground usurped by the AAP over the past decade had consistently accused Kejriwal and his AAP colleagues of being “steeped in corruption”. In fact, in the Delhi excise policy case and other cases for which Kejriwal and his colleagues are either currently in jail or facing investigations, Dikshit and other Congress leaders were among the original complainants.

As such, the Congress-AAP alliance in Delhi was always on shaky ground, irrespective of what party leaders, including Lovely, may have said in public. What has, however, compounded the disaffection within the Congress’s Delhi ranks is the party high command’s decision to field “outsiders” Kanhaiya and Udit as candidates instead of “old loyalists” despite the AAP parting with just three of Delhi’s seven seats in the seat-sharing arrangement.

'Ethically wrong of Lovely to resign'

A senior party leader who was critical of Lovely’s resignation and subsequent comments told The Federal that it was “politically and ethically wrong of Lovely to resign in this manner and leak his resignation letter to the press”, more so because as the Delhi Congress chief it was he who was “negotiating the alliance with AAP and sitting in meetings of our election committee to finalise candidates”. This leader, however, asserted, “what Lovely has done does not take away from the fact that the central leadership seems completely clueless about sentiments of grassroots Congress workers in Delhi and this is reflected in the candidature of Kanhaiya and Udit Raj, who may have contributed to the party nationally as spokespersons but have zero influence in the seats they have been fielded from.”

Lovely claims that he had informed the party high command of the Delhi unit’s objections to any truck with the AAP but decided to support it once the central leadership took a stand in the alliance’s favour. On the candidature of Kanhaiya and Udit, the former Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC) chief claims he learnt about it “only when the candidate list was announced” and that he had, during meetings to screen candidates for Delhi’s three seats, had “put forward names of loyal party leaders such as Sandeep Dikshit and Raj Kumar Chauhan (from North East Delhi and North West Delhi, respectively, after withdrawing my own claim on contesting the election because we had only three seats and several aspiring candidates”.

Interestingly, Dikshit, who was among the party leaders who called on Lovely on Sunday had sought a ticket not from North East Delhi but Chandni Chowk, the third seat that Congress is contesting from in the national capital. “I did not ask for a ticket from North East Delhi. I wanted to contest from Chandni Chowk but since the party has given the ticket to our senior colleague (ex-MP JP Aggarwal), I am working like an ordinary soldier of the party to ensure we win the three seats we are contesting from,” Dikshit, the late Sheila Dikshit’s son and former two-term MP from the East Delhi seat, told The Federal.

Dikshit's appeal

A bitter critic of the AAP himself, Dikshit said, “The central leadership cannot and should not ignore what Lovely has highlighted in his resignation”, indicating that he agreed with the rebel leader’s view, but added, “This is not an ordinary election because its results will determine whether India’s democracy as we know it will survive or not and so I appeal to Lovely as well as our central leaders to not act in haste... we have to build, resolve issues instead of complicating them further”.

While the BJP has been jubilant at this latest crisis that has hit the Congress and its INDIA ally, dubbing Lovely’s resignation as “another admission of their imminent defeat in all seven seats of Delhi”, Kanhaiya and Udit have refrained from countering the charges coming their way. The AAP, though, has waded into the raging row with its senior Delhi minister Saurabh Bhardwaj claiming that Lovely is set to join the BJP and “will be fielded from the East Delhi constituency” as replacement of the saffron party’s current candidate Harsh Malhotra. Bhardwaj’s claim, interestingly, has been also echoed by Congress leader Asif Mohammed Khan, a former MLA and brother of Kerala Governor Arif Mohammad Khan, who had tried to storm into Lovely’s house earlier on Sunday and was manhandled by the former DPCC chief’s supporters.

Congress sources told The Federal that both Kanhaiya, who faces the BJP’s incumbent North East Delhi MP and candidate Manoj Tiwari, and Udit, who is pitted against the BJP’s Yogendra Chandolia, have been having a tough time getting Congress and AAP workers to campaign for them.

The AAP, said sources, had also conveyed its displeasure to the Congress over Kanhaiya’s candidature but was “politely told that deciding candidates is the prerogative of the party contesting the seat and not of the ally”. An AAP leader said the party sees Kanhaiya as a “liability” not just for the Congress but for the INDIA alliance in Delhi given his controversial past and hugely polarising political persona.

“His candidature will only help the BJP, which is anyway strong in that constituency and has an MP who is far more popular among the Purvanchali voters (migrants from east UP and Bihar who constitute a huge chunk of the electorate in North East Delhi constituency) than Kanhaiya. The BJP has succeeded in branding Kanhaiya as a face of the 'Tukde Tukde Gang' and as someone who is anti-Sanatan Dharma and anti-India... when campaigning gains momentum in Delhi, whatever Kanhaiya says will obviously be twisted by the BJP and used to its advantage to polarise the election which will damage the Congress and us equally,” an AAP leader who was part of the seat-sharing negotiations with the Congress told The Federal.

Lovely's resignation to impact Congress in Delhi

It is obvious that the political storm over Lovely’s resignation will adversely impact the Congress across all three seats that the party is contesting but the AAP won’t remain unscathed either. Sources in both parties admit that there is a “mutual distrust” among leaders and workers of the two parties which will only be amplified further in light of Lovely’s resignation. The AAP, which had been hoping to make its Lok Sabha debut from Delhi in this election riding on public sympathy over Kejriwal’s arrest, sources said, has reached out to the Congress high command to “contain the damage” by ensuring that more such outbursts don’t come from its prominent Delhi leaders.

The two parties, which had put up a united face earlier this month at the INDIA bloc’s Loktantra Bachao rally at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan with former Congress president Sonia Gandhi visibly comforting the jailed Kejriwal’s wife, Sunita Kejriwal on stage, could explore more joint campaigns of its senior leaders in Delhi in wake of the fresh controversy. Sources said both parties want Kharge, former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi to take charge of the Delhi campaign and rein in potentially rogue leaders at the earliest.