BJP kickstarts campaigns for Punjab assembly polls 2027 after 7 AAP MPs join saffron party

New Delhi: With the entry of seven Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Rajya Sabha MPs in the BJP, the saffron party has officially kickstarted the campaigns for the Punjab Assembly polls in 2027. In addition to that, the party’s numbers in the Rajya Sabha, which is inching closer to two-thirds majority, was a key driver for the move.

After a press conference at the Constitution Club, former AAP MP Raghav Chadha paid a visit to the BJP party headquarters with Sandeep Pathak and Ashok Mittal where they met President Nitin Nabin.

After the press conference, BJP General Secretary Tarun Chugh said that those who are with “truth” came to BJP. “The way AAP has worked, Punjab has been turned into a syndicate of loot and is being exploited. Today, this has been exposed, and due to suffocation under their corrupt loot system, those within their party who stand with the truth have left Kejriwal today,” he said.

For the BJP, this is not merely a consolidation of dominance in the upper house and an increase in tally, it is a simultaneous opening of a new electoral front in Punjab.

Six of the seven defecting MPs hold Rajya Sabha seats from Punjab, a state where the BJP currently has no MLAs and where the AAP government of Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann is the principal target heading into the 2027 assembly election.

The entry of Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, Harbhajan Singh, Rajinder Gupta, Vikramjit Singh Sahney, and Ashok Mittal gives the BJP a set of recognisable faces for Punjab who until recently were part of the machinery behind AAP’s landslide 2022 victory.

BJP Punjab president Sunil Jakhar, who had publicly anticipated the move, framed the defection in electoral terms. “This was the right time to leave the sinking ship,” he said, citing AAP’s governance record on corruption and law and order.

In 2022, AAP won 92 of 117 assembly seats in 2022 on an anti-corruption plank, and is now the only surviving state in the party’s kitty.

For the BJP, the implications are substantial in the Rajya Sabha; the BJP’s standalone Rajya Sabha strength has now moved from 106 to 113 with the merger.

Factoring in nominated members aligned with the party, BJP’s effective working strength reaches approximately 120. The NDA bloc as a whole now stands at around 148, comfortably above the majority mark of 123, placing the alliance roughly 25 seats clear of the threshold.

As a consequence, the Rajya Sabha which is structurally less resistant to government legislation, and where opposition coalitions could slow or extract concessions on contentious bills, has changed for the BJP.

While a two-thirds majority, the bar required for constitutional amendments, remains out of reach for the BJP alone, but the BJP’s intention is now clear.

Under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, a merger is valid if at least two-thirds of a legislative party’s members support it. With seven of AAP’s ten Rajya Sabha MPs signing on, the bar is technically met, with all seven retaining their seats without risk of disqualification.