Shabby dishonesty is often the last refuge of political defectors, and Raghav Chadha’s claim that Arvind Kejriwal has turned his new official residence as leader of the opposition in Delhi into a second “Sheesh Mahal” bears all the marks of a convenient falsehood. Crafted to cloak his own betrayal – and that of six other Aam Aadmi Party MPs – in the language of outrage, his assertion is a bald-faced lie. How can I be so sure? First, because I visited Kejriwal at his new home and am therefore able to compare the changes that the Delhi government (under a BJP chief minister) has made to it with what it was originally. Second, I am familiar with its former layout because I was a frequent visitor to the two adjoining houses in the same row that I had visited frequently over the previous 50 years. Third, because I had lived in an identical house at 17, Kasturba Gandhi Lane (then Curzon Lane), as a child from 1948 till 1950. All of these houses had been designed on a single pattern and had been intended for deputy secretary-level officers of the British colonial government. 96, Lodhi Estate (located on Lodhi Road) was the residence of Krishan Bhatia, editor of the Hindustan Times, when I joined the paper in1966. 97, Lodhi Estate is where Shashi Tharoor has been living after joining the Manmohan Singh government in 2009. These homes, and the one I lived in, were identical in design to 6, Flagstaff Road, where Kejriwal insisted upon living when he was the chief minister of Delhi. Kejriwal had forsaken not only Raj Nivas in old Delhi, where chief secretaries of the capital had stayed in British times, but also 3, Motilal Nehru Road where his predecessor Sheila Dikshit had stayed. Kejriwal’s present home occupies about the same floor space as the three homes described above. What has been added to it is a separate two-room office for his staff and visitors, and probably (because I did not see them) some quarters for his security detail at the back, where the servants’ quarters of the original house used to be. His reception room is bare of artefacts to the point of being stark. There are no comfortable sofas, no paintings on the walls, and no memorabilia on its side tables to relieve its severity. If the rest of the house has been similarly refurbished, it is the very opposite of a luxurious residence, let alone the ‘Sheesh Mahal 2’ that defector Raghav Chadha has called it. The real story of the defections Chadha was one of Kejriwal’s blue-eyed boys, and no defection has hurt him as much as his has. The main reason for his defection appears simple – it is blackmail by the BJP. This blackmail, like so much more that has preceded it during the past eight years, has been made possible by one unforgivable omission in the constitution. That is the lack of any provision for the legal financing of elections in the largest constituencies of the democratic world. This lacuna was made more acute by the ban on corporate donations to political parties that was enacted by a then inexperienced prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in 1969. That ban tore down the walls that had remained till then between crime and politics. After that, politicians had to break the law if they wanted to raise the money to fight an election. Over five-and-a half decades, that ban has criminalised Indian politics beyond repair. Till the BJP came to power in 2014, there had been a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ among all parties not to take advantage of this to attack opposition leaders, because all of them were culpable to the same extent. But the Modi government broke this tacit agreement, amending the Prevention of Money Laundering Act to reverse the burden of proof in law and using allegations of undeclared income and expenditure to break opposing parties like the Nationalist Congress Party and the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, and jail powerful opponents in other states where the BJP wanted to come to power. Given the cases that had already been filed against them in various courts because of their murky records as the chief and home minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah must have realised that the citizens’ rights and freedoms that they were taking away, notably of habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence, could one day be used against them. The speed and thoroughness with which they destroyed these was therefore the most unequivocal warning that the parties of the opposition could have received that their purpose, from the very beginning, was to destroy India’s democracy. But this obvious conclusion was not voiced till very recently, and still has not been acted upon, by a single political leader or party in the country. Raghav ChadhaRaghav Chadha was one of the BJP’s first targets within the Aam Admi Party in Delhi. Along with Bhagwant Singh Mann, he had been appointed joint in-charge of AAP’s Punjab unit in December 2020. The party’s landslide victory in February 2022 – and the BJP and Akalis’ humiliating defeat – made him and Mann prime targets for destruction through the Enforcement Directorate. As Chadha lived in Delhi where the BJP controlled the police, he became easy prey. The first sign that he had “gone astray” was his silence, and absence from protests when Kejriwal was arrested and taken to prison on grounds of having engineered the infamous “liquor scam”. The party made excuses for him then, stating that he had gone to London for medical reasons. But this was only the beginning. Chadha was notably absent from the AAP meetings and rallies that followed, and was also absent from the celebrations when the cases against Sanjay Singh, Manish Sisodia and Satyendra Jain were thrown out, and Kejriwal was released on interim bail. During this period, the Modi government also dragged his name into the “liquor scam” case, but Chadha managed to stay out of jail. But by then he had held several other positions – notably the vice-chairmanship of the Delhi Jal Board – all of which require the handling of large sums of money. He was thus easy prey, so Amit Shah unleashed the CBI and the Anti-Corruption Bureau on him. When Kejriwal was arrested and sent to jail, Chadha went to London and stayed there on one pretext or another throughout the period of his incarceration. His explanation, that he had gone for serious eye surgery that required him to stay in London for an extended period was universally disbelieved in his party. However, it would have been true if he had been diagnosed with a detached retina, because the operation to reattach it is extremely difficult and requires the patient to stay close to his surgeon for a minimum of seven weeks after it to give the eye that has been operated upon time to return to normal. Chadha may therefore have had a valid reason for staying away, but by then he had begun to be universally distrusted in the AAP, so he became an easy target for the BJP’s party-breakers. Chadha’s defection to the BJP remains inexcusable, but the emotions, and eventually the blackmail, that made him its easy prey are understandable. Swati MaliwalSwati Maliwal, the second of the seven defectors, had also been one of Kejriwal’s earliest and most trusted recruits into the Aam Aadmi Party, and had fully shared his commitment to improving the lives of the people by starting from the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, i.e. with the poorest citizens first. In 2015, Kejriwal appointed her chairperson of the Delhi Commission on Women, and she became one of his most trusted associates. According to a widely disseminated version of the reasons for her defection to the BJP, her problems began with charges of nepotism and seeking “illegal gratification” (i.e. bribes), framed against her by the Modi government. The charges were made by her predecessor in the Delhi Commission for Women, Congresswoman Barkha Singh, who had been the chief of the Delhi Mahila Congress, but had been expelled from the party for six years in April 2017 for “anti-party activities” following public criticism of its leader, Rahul Gandhi. Once that had happened, in typical Amit Shah style, the BJP lost no time in wooing her into its fold. In 2016, Barkha Singh alleged that Maliwal had illegally appointed AAP workers and acquaintances to the DCW, bypassing proper recruitment procedures. The charge was suspicious from the very beginning, but it gave the Union government-controlled Delhi Police and its Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) the excuse they needed to charge Maliwal with nepotism and various other illegal actions. Her recruitment by the BJP was a demonic piece of art that began then, and was completed eight years later. Delhi’s ACB operates as a specialised investigative wing under the Directorate of Vigilance. Its primary, almost sole, focus is the investigation of corruption cases against officials of the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD), and it reports not to the elected chief minister of Delhi, but directly to the Lieutenant Governor of the state. That, in effect today, means directly to Amit Shah.Based on the ACB’s accusation, a Delhi court framed charges of criminal conspiracy against her and three others under the Prevention of Corruption Act, noting that these appointments “clearly reflect nepotism” and were made in an “opaque manner”. The prosecutors also alleged that a significant number of the 90 appointments made by the DCW between 2015 and 2016 had been of persons linked to the AAP. When the Delhi high court dismissed Maliwal’s plea to quash the charges, and allowed the trial court proceedings to continue, she became easy prey for the BJP. From then on, according to a Times of India report of April 24, 2026, Maliwal’s dissent grew sharper. “She openly criticised the leadership, attacked key decisions, and refused to step down despite pressure from within. Her opposition peaked when she sharply criticised the appointment of Atishi as Delhi’s acting chief minister after Kejriwal was arrested and taken to jail, calling it a ‘dummy’ arrangement and questioning the party’s direction”. Whether it was a charade aimed at the misdirection of public attention or some sort of genuine misunderstanding, the fight Maliwal picked with Kejriwal’s secretary, Bibhav Kumar, at Kejriwal’s home on May 18, 2024 marked a key turning point for her. On that day, she went to Kejriwal’s home without making an appointment, and without even informing his secretary, at the highly irregular time of 8.30 am.After arriving unannounced, she demanded immediate entry into Kejriwal’s reception room at the front end of his home. When the security staff prevented her from entering it she picked a fight with them and left them with no option but to allow her into the reception room and then phone Kejriwal’s secretary for help. Bibhav Kumar received the call at about 9 am, arrived at the CM’s house at 9.40 am, and scolded her for not making an appointment with Kejriwal and not even informing Kumar that she wanted to see him urgently, before barging into his house at an ungodly hour. Had she done so, he would have informed her that Kejriwal was not in Delhi but in Varanasi attending a rally with Akhilesh Yadav. Maliwal’s account of what followed has been disputed by Kumar and its credibility has still to be tested in court. She claimed that Kumar not only slapped her several times, but kicked her in her stomach, pelvis and chest. Although Kumar is fairly tall, he was, at the time, severely overweight and would have found it difficult to raise his foot high enough to kick anyone in the stomach, let alone the chest, without falling over backwards.Maliwal did not immediately file the complaint alleging that she had been kicked in the stomach and chest. She filed it three days later, after a four hour visit to her home by Pramod Kushwah, the Additional Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) and a lady police officer, Anjitha Chepyala, who was the Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (North). The accusations of nepotism against her might have served as an incentive for her to defect – especially given the manner in which cases against her faded away once she had jumped ship. This, incidentally, is true of every person who has defected from AAP to the BJP in the last fortnight.Harbhajan SinghThe third defector, Harbhajan Singh, is a cricketer and, more importantly, a sportscaster and commentator for cricket matches. His income, therefore, depends on the number of assignments he receives, which in turn are likely to be a function of the goodwill the BCCI has towards him. Given the oversized links between the BCCI and BJP, it might be fair to say that Singh now depends to a very large extent upon the BJP’s patronage for his tournament assignments. Ashok MittalThe story of the fourth defector, Ashok Mittal, attains a deeper level of betrayal. Mittal is the founder of Lovely Professional University at Phagwara in Punjab. When Kejriwal was finally released from jail and had no home, Mittal vacated the bungalow at 5 Ferozeshah Road, in order to give Kejriwal somewhere to stay after his release from jail. But apparently he had made the decision to betray AAP earlier, for he defected on April 24, 2026, just hours after Arvind Kejriwal had left the shelter that Mittal had provided for him. His defection was clearly coerced, because it followed the now familiar path: investigation by the Enforcement Directorate, discovery of unaccounted wealth or transactions, and an offer of silence in return for defection to the BJP, that nine out of 10 political defections and party splits in the past six years have followed.The blackmail of Ashok Mittal had begun with a raid by the Enforcement Directorate at 6 am on April 16 and simultaneous raids on his sons in Gurgaon and Jalandhar two days later. What happened next is understandable: Mittal joined the BJP to save his sons. Rajinder Gupta The next one on the BJP’s list was Rajinder Gupta. Gupta had gone to the US for open-heart surgery and had remained in the ICU there for many days after that. He had just been shifted to a normal recovery room on April 24, when Raghav Chadha announced his defection. Hearing the news, he made two frantic calls to senior leaders of the AAP. While the truth in this instance is impossible to establish, these leaders have alleged, presumably on the basis of what Gupta told them, that the two individuals who visited Gupta in his recovery room introduced themselves as intelligence agents, and threatened him, telling him to join the BJP “or your son in India will be arrested”. Vikramjit Singh SahneySahney met Kejriwal on April 2, two days before the press conference of April 4 and assured him of his complete loyalty to the AAP. When Kejriwal asked him whether he would be able to withstand the grilling and pressure from the ED, he went quiet and then admitted that he would not be able to do so indefinitely. When Kejriwal therefore suggested that he should resign his Rajya Sabha seat rather than join the BJP, he asked for two days to think it over. But before the end of the two days, he too had joined the BJP. In an interview he gave to Rajdeep Sardesai, Sahney has admitted that he met Amit Shah immediately after meeting Kejriwal, and gave him his consent. Sandeep Pathak Pathak’s betrayal is the heaviest blow that Kejriwal has suffered in this mass defection, not only because he was the second-in-command in the AAP’s national secretariat, but because it was after he defected that the BJP called a press conference presenting him and two of the other defectors with their cooked up claims that they were leaving because Kejriwal had not lived up to his promise to provide a corruption-free government. Pathak is a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. At the time of AAP’s formation in 2011 he had taken a sabbatical and was working as a volunteer for the nascent party, when Kejriwal spotted him. By 2019, through sheer intelligence and hard work, he had risen to be the number two in the AAP’s national secretariat. Kejriwal was very fond of him, and had made him a Rajya Sabha member in 2022 within 2 years of his having formally joined the party. The AAP’s defeat in 2024 shattered Pathak. Kejriwal offered him the secretaryship of the national organisation, but he refused the post. Kejriwal then offered him AAP’s leadership in Punjab or Gujarat, but he refused to accept either of these, and went to Goa where he stayed for 10 days before deciding to refuse the leadership of the party in Goa as well. Instead he asked for Chhattisgarh, which was his home state, and requested that he be declared AAP’s chief ministerial candidate before the elections. Such was Kejriwal’s faith and trust in Pathak, that he agreed. But the Chhattisgarh elections were four years away in November 2028. This was too long a wait for Pathak, so he again asked for two months’ leave to think it over. Pathak presumably took these months not to ‘think it over’ but to explore his prospects with the BJP. And the BJP grabbed him with both hands. It was only after he confirmed that he was willing to defect to the BJP that the Modi government launched its coup against AAP. On April 24, Raghav Chadha, Ashok Mittal and Sandeep Pathak jointly addressed a press conference at 4 pm. In it, all three professed their disillusionment with the Aam Aadmi Party, and Kejriwal, in particular. Had they quit the party and resigned their Rajya Sabha memberships, one might have been able to give them the benefit of doubt. But they did not do that and instead announced their decision to join the BJP – a party that each had publicly condemned in the past in the clearest of terms. Pathak’s betrayal of Kejriwal and the AAP is perhaps the most brazenly unprincipled act seen in Indian politics in recent times. For he had visited Kejriwal at his residence just a day earlier and sworn his eternal loyalty to him. So great was Kejriwal’s trust in Pathak that he shared his entire strategy for foiling the BJP’s bid to destroy AAP, and confided to him that he intended to launch it in the next 48 hours.Pathak lost no time in disclosing Kejriwal’s plan to the BJP as his entry card into the party, thereby allowing it to forestall Kejriwal by holding its own press conference a day earlier to announce the mass defection of the AAP’s 10 Rajya Sabha members. Such are the acts of betrayal and deceit, not to mention hatred and violence, upon which the BJP is building the future “Hindu” state of India. How long a nation built upon such foundations can endure is anyone’s guess. But history has shown us time and again, that it cannot be very long.