By NIRENDRA DEV
New Delhi, April 4, 2026 — When a city’s most distinctive political trait is the art of hijacking other people’s causes and converting them into personal capital, the party that emerges from that city will reflect that trait — completely, faithfully, and eventually fatally.
The Raghav Chadha episode is not an aberration in AAP’s story. It is the story, arriving at its logical destination.
The origin: someone else’s movement
It started with the UPA-2 government and its systematic legitimisation of corruption from the moment the 2009 mandate came in. The Radia tapes, the portfolio allocations, the roles played by television anchors in manufacturing political narratives — all of it created the condition for a counter-movement. Anna Hazare provided the moral authority. Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi provided the organisational energy.
What neither Hazare nor the millions who flooded Jantar Mantar anticipated was that the protagonists of the anti-corruption movement were themselves operating with a different set of motivations. Hazare’s associates have been leaving AAP steadily since the party’s early years.
Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav were, as it was claimed, kicked out. Kumar Vishwas, Ashutosh, Shazia Ilmi — the list of early believers who left or were removed is long enough to constitute a pattern.
BJP general secretary Tarun Chugh put it without diplomatic padding: “Use and throw — this is the policy of Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party. National poet Kumar Vishwas, Ashutosh, Shazia Ilmi, Kiran Bedi — the list is long. The people who formed the Aam Aadmi Party, Swati Maliwal, where have they gone? People are constantly leaving the party. They’ve seen his ugly face.”
Chugh added: “Arvind Kejriwal wears a mask underneath which is corruption, fraud, forgery, loot, and embezzlement. That’s why those who joined the Aam Aadmi Party in the name of change are constantly leaving him.”
Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva, a veteran of the city’s power politics with long associations with figures like Vijay Malhotra and Vijay Goel, offered a more measured observation. “Deciding who to appoint as a leader or sub-leader is an internal decision of any party. AAP has done it too.
But the way it has been written to the Rajya Sabha Secretariat that Raghav Chadha should not be allowed to speak is highly objectionable,” he said.
There are merits in Sachdeva’s analysis — and an irony in BJP raising it.
The Delhi ‘jugadu’ system explained
To understand AAP, you must understand Delhi’s particular political culture — a culture built on what might be called ‘jugadu’ politics: the improvisational, connection-dependent, perception-managed world of NCR power-broking. It begins at the India International Centre and the India Habitat Centre, runs through Press Club seminars, and operates on two core questions: what do you owe me, and what can I get from this?
In 2011-12, everyone who joined the Lokpal movement wanted something. Some wanted visibility. Some wanted political careers. Some wanted to settle scores with the Congress establishment. Kejriwal, who as chief minister would later sleep near Rail Bhavan in an anarchist performance, wanted all of the above — and he got them.
The excitement this generated in certain media circles was remarkable.
In a media office in Noida’s Sector 16, a tall senior editor would reportedly run across the hall and shout ‘Swami Narayan’ every time Kejriwal tweeted.
Young reporters were reprimanded for not giving Kejriwal’s Independence Day address from the Delhi secretariat the same reverence accorded to the prime minister’s speech from the Red Fort.
The AAP government subsequently obliged Delhi’s voters with cheap and abundant liquor — a policy that became its nemesis in ways no one in that organisation appears to have anticipated.
Kiran Bedi’s arc as a case study
The Kiran Bedi story is instructive. She was always a formidable and self-promoting police officer — her history includes a tenure as DGP in Mizoram that was marked, critics said, by a notable prioritisation of personal interests.
In Delhi’s perception economy, she was a valuable brand. She joined the BJP in 2015 and was fielded as the party’s chief ministerial candidate — and BJP was routed 3-67 in the assembly elections.
The brand had limits.
The same IIT-to-Jindal narrative applies in Kharagpur. Being jugadu mattered in the NCR.
The Moditva phenomenon has displaced much of that ecosystem — the Left-Liberal press club intellectual circuit is itself restless and exhausted — but the habits of mind it produced do not disappear easily.
Raghav Chadha: the party’s Punjab asset, now its public problem
When AAP made its decisive breakthrough in Punjab, Raghav Chadha was a key organisational architect. He had a role in the party’s expansion beyond Delhi — an expansion that took AAP into a state with its own version of Delhi’s socio-political philosophy. He became the youngest Rajya Sabha MP of his time. He married Bollywood actress Parineeti Chopra. He built a personal media presence that was increasingly decoupled from AAP’s collective identity.
But the record contains earlier complications. During the Covid-19 lockdown of March 2020, Chadha — then AAP’s MLA from Rajinder Nagar — posted a tweet about migration that subsequently went viral for the wrong reasons. The tweet was later deleted. An advocate, Prashant Patel, reportedly filed a complaint against him. The charges included creating enmity and defaming Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath under sections of the IPC and the IT Act.
The larger controversy concerned the Delhi Transport Corporation’s deployment of buses — reportedly 40 or more — to transport migrant workers to UP borders during the lockdown panic of March 20-21, 2020, when thousands were moving toward Lucknow and district towns including Ballia, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Azamgarh, and Deoria. The BJP alleged the exodus was orchestrated. The DTC falls under the Delhi government. Chadha was part of what was characterised as Kejriwal’s inner operational team.
Now, on April 3, 2026, a senior AAP leader has said: “Jo darr gaya, samjho marr gaya.” He who is afraid is as good as dead.
Chadha’s own response was a river-and-flood metaphor. “I am that river which becomes a flood when the time comes,” he said.
What comes next
Chadha has miles of political road ahead. The 2027 Punjab assembly elections are on the horizon. He remains well-known, media-fluent, and — unlike many politicians who fall out with their parties — not obviously associated with a single catastrophic failure. The question hovering over his next move: will he put on a saffron scarf?
AAP’s geographic footprint beyond Delhi is instructive here. It made it big in Punjab. It made modest inroads in Gujarat — more because voters there had no credible Congress alternative to BJP than because of any deep ideological connection.
In Nagaland, AAP’s promise to eradicate corruption was received as romantic fiction. Many AAP leaders were told plainly: “You want to end corruption — so why here?”
Nagaland’s jugadu politics begins in crores.
The party that was born hijacking Anna Hazare’s movement is now watching one of its most prominent faces frame himself as a river about to become a flood. Anna Hazare himself never quite knew what kind of people he was banking on. Perhaps that is the most honest thing that can be said about how this all began.
(courtesy - The Raisina Hills)
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