New Delhi: Rajya Sabha chairman CP Radhakrishnan has accepted the merger of seven Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) lawmakers into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Union Parliamentary Affairs minister Kiren Rijiju said on Monday.
Consequently, BJP’s strength has gone up to 113, as per the Rajya Sabha secretariat’s notification on the revised strength of parties in the Upper House of Parliament.
The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA’s) strength has risen to 148, including five nominated lawmakers, pushing it closer to a two-thirds majority in the 245-member House.
AAP, which had 10 members in Rajya Sabha, is down to three.
Rijiju said in a post on X that Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, Ashok Mittal, Harbhajan Singh, Swati Maliwal, Rajinder Gupta and Vikramjit Singh Sahney are now members of the BJP parliamentary party.
AAP MP Sanjay Singh said on Sunday AAP had formally asked the Rajya Sabha chairman to cancel the memberships of the seven MPs as the merger is not legal.
“After consulting constitutional experts and seeking legal opinion from Kapil Sibal, I have sent a petition to the (Rajya Sabha) chairman (CP Radhakrishnan) requesting that the membership of these members be terminated as per the 10th Schedule of the Constitution,” Singh had said, referring to the anti-defection law which stipulates that two-thirds of the elected members of a party must agree to merge with another to avoid disqualification.
The law requires two-thirds of the “original” party to merge, pointed out Singh.
Obviously chairman Radhakrishnan, who is the country’s Vice-President, didn’t concur
