Delhi Congress President Resigns Over Alliance With AAP And "Total Stranger" Candidates Like Kanhaiya Kumar, Udit Raj

Days after Congress workers protested against "outsider" candidates in Delhi, the party's Delhi president Arvinder Singh Lovely resigned citing the alliance with Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the issue of ticket distribution.

In a letter dated 27 April, he wrote, "The Delhi Congress Unit was against an alliance with a Party which was formed on the sole basis of leveling false, fabricated and malafide corruption charges against the Congress Party. Despite that, the Party made a decision to ally with the AAP in Delhi."

He then went on to point out that under this alliance, the Congress got only three of Delhi's seven Lok Sabha seats but despite that, two of these tickets were given to those candidates who were "total strangers to the Delhi Congress and the Party Policies."

Lovely was referring to North West Delhi and North East Delhi candidates, Udit Raj and Kanhaiya Kumar respectively. Though Udit Raj has been an MP of North West Delhi, he is being called an outsider because he won the 2014 elections as a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate.

Kanhaiya Kumar too came to the Congress from another party and does not even hail from the constituency from where he has been fielded. He contested the 2019 elections on the Communist Party of India (CPI) symbol from Bihar's Begusarai and lost by a margin of over 4 lakh votes.

Lovely alleged that "shockingly", the Delhi Congress was "not even intimidated" about these two candidates before the final announcement and hence he could not pacify the local leaders, he said referring to the recent protest.

He highlighted that while Udit Raj has given "derogatory and anti-party statements" disrespecting Congress workers, Kanhaiya Kumar too has praised Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal "in contravention of the partly line."

Lovely pointed towards Kumar's AajTak interview, where he "endorsed the false propaganda of AAP in regard to the supposed works done by them in the Education, Health, Road and Electricity sector" and criticised putting him into jail.

The Delhi Congress president asserted that the alliance "was not done in appreciation of AAP's false propaganda" but as a "compromise to improve chances of victory for the party." He also declined to suspend dissenting leaders.