Days after stepping down as head of the Delhi Congress, Arvinder Singh Lovely joins the BJP

Lovely gave notice of her resignation as head of the party’s Delhi chapter, citing her affiliation with the AAP among her reasons. He claimed that although the Delhi Congress unit opposed the alliance with the AAP, it was still approved by the party’s top headquarters.

On May 4, Amrinder Singh Lovely, a former Congress leader, became a member of the Bhartiya Janata Party in Delhi. The event occurs a few days after he left his position as the grand old party’s president of Delhi.
Lovely gave notice of her resignation as head of the party’s Delhi chapter, citing her affiliation with the AAP among her reasons. He claimed that although the Delhi Congress unit opposed the alliance with the AAP, it was still approved by the party’s top headquarters.

Lovely further claimed that Deepak Babria, the AICC Delhi in-charge, had “unilaterally vetoed” every consensual decision made by the senior Delhi unit leaders in his resignation letter to Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge.
In the presence of Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri, he joined the BJP along with four other former Congress leaders. Along with Delhi Youth Congress head Amit Malik, the four other new members of the party include former Congress MLAs Rajkumar Chauhan, Neeraj Basoya, and Naseeb Singh, who had recently quit the party.

“Former DUSU President Shri Amit Malik and former Delhi MLAs, Arvinder Singh Lovely, Rajkumar Chauhan, Neeraj Basoya and Naseeb Singh, join the BJP at party headquarters in New Delhi,” the BJP wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

August of last year saw Lovely named as the head of the Delhi Congress. In 2017, he left the Congress to join the BJP, but he soon rejoined the group after a year.

Kanhaiya Kumar, the Congress candidate for North East Delhi, was also criticized by Lovely for praising Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who is currently being held in a jail related to money laundering.
“The candidate from North-East Delhi has also been giving media bytes falsely praising the Delhi CM, in direct contravention of the party line and the local party workers’ beliefs,” he stated, adding that Kanhaiya supported the “false propaganda of AAP in regard to the supposed works done by them in education, health, road and electricity sectors.”

According to Lovely, the announcement of Udit Raj’s and Kanhaiya Kumar’s candidacies for the North West Delhi seat did not go over well with Congress leaders and members, who view them as “outsiders”.
The Congress fielded Lovely in the East Delhi constituency to compete against Gautam Gambhir of the BJP and Atishi of the AAP in the 2019 elections. He was not given a ticket this time around since the Congress is running for three seats as part of its partnership with the AAP.