What caused Delhi Congress head Arvinder Singh Lovely to resign?

NEW DELHI: With less than a month to go before the capital’s elections, Delhi Congress chief Arvinder Singh Lovely resigned from his position on Sunday, citing the party’s alliance with the AAP in the city, the high command’s selection of candidates for the Lok Sabha, and his lack of freedom to choose party officials in his own way.

Lovely remarked that his resignation represented the suffering of Congress employees because the “ideals they had been fighting for during the last seven to eight years” were being compromised, while maintaining that he was not joining any other political party.

Lovely said, “We are fighting the elections together, but Congress workers never said we were giving them (the AAP) a clean chit or credit for building schools and hospitals, which is far from the reality.”

Lovely stated in his letter of resignation to Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge that while the state unit opposed the partnership, the top leadership continued with it. In addition, he voiced his disapproval of Kanhaiya Kumar, the Congress candidate from North East Delhi, and Udit Raj, the candidate from North West Delhi.

Lovely is not the first to pull a surprise on you. He left the party in 2017 to join the BJP, although he subsequently joined the Congress again in 2018.

Lovely said that the AICC general secretary for Delhi in-charge, Deepak Babaria, had unilaterally rejected every consensual decision made by top Delhi Congress officials, and that the state unit had not even been informed of the choices, which included choosing the Lok Sabha candidates. Lovely, who was chosen state president last year, said that he openly supported the AAP coalition despite the Delhi Congress unit’s opposition and made sure the unit as a whole “fell in line with the high command’s final order.”.
“Half of the AAP’s cabinet ministers are currently in jail on corruption charges; the Delhi Congress unit was against an alliance with a party that was founded on the sole basis of leveling false, fabricated, and mala fide corruption charges against Congress.”
In spite of this, the Congress Party decided to form an alliance with the AAP in Delhi. We honored the party’s ultimate choice. Even though it went against my stance on the subject, I even went so far as to visit CM (Arvind) Kejriwal’s home the night of his incarceration with Subhash Chopra and Sandeep Dikshit,” he claimed.

AAP is vying for four seats in Delhi as alliance partners: East, New Delhi, South, and West; Congress is vying for the other three seats: North East, North West, and Chandni Chowk.

“Since I became the president of the Delhi-based DPCC, the AICC general secretary in charge has prohibited me from holding any high-level positions inside the DPCC. My proposal to have a seasoned leader manage DPCC’s media efforts was flatly turned down. He hasn’t yet given the DPCC the authority to name every block president in the city. As a result, Delhi has more than 150 blocks without a block president, according to Lovely.

He said that Babaria compelled him to put Raj Kumar Chauhan, a top party official, on leave. “Rather than attempting to defuse the situation, he went on to engage in multiple heated exchanges at public gatherings with former MP Sandeep Dikshit, former Delhi minister Raj Kumar Chauhan, former MLA Bhisham Sharma, and former MLA Surender Kumar,” the letter reads.

AAP officials mostly stayed silent about the events, opting instead to observe. However, Minister Saurabh Bharadwaj said, “I think it’s better that they (Congress) speak about it because they are our alliance partner and this is an internal party matter.”

Lovely also criticized Kanhaiya Kumar, the Congress candidate for North East Delhi, for praising Chief Minister Kejriwal, who was detained in connection with a suspected money laundering case involving the Delhi excise policy.

“The North East Delhi candidate has also been promoting the Delhi Chief Minister in the media while lying, which is a clear violation of the party line and the views of the local party members. He supported the AAP’s deceptive advertising about their purported accomplishments in the areas of education, health, roads, and energy, which is in stark contrast to the real facts and the suffering of Delhi residents,” he added.

“The Delhi Congress unit has not been well received by such ill-considered and factually incorrect statements, as local party workers understood that the alliance was not formed in appreciation of AAP’s false propaganda about Delhi’s development, but rather as a compromise to increase Congress’s chances of winning the Lok Sabha elections.”

Lovely continued: “It appears that the North East Delhi candidate is unaware of the fact that, admittedly, the condition of schools, hospitals and public infrastructure in Delhi, under the AAP government has severely worsened compared with the development work done under the late Sheila Dikshit Ji’s Congress regime,” said Lovely.