NEW DELHI: Another member of the Aam Aadmi Party left the outfit on Friday when Alka Lamba, MLA from Chandni Chowk assembly constituency, sent her resignation to the party on social media and joined the Congress the same day.
The future is still uncertain for Lamba in the Congress, to which her return was expected for some time after her differences with the senior AAP leadership grew over the matter of an AAP resolution asking for the Bharat Ratna awarded to former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to be taken back.
“I was away for six years from the Congress, but for the last 25 years I have been with the party, this is my ghar wapsi. We will work to strengthen the Congress party in Delhi and across the country,” Lamba said after joining the party.Lamba and AAP spokesperson Saurabh Bhardwaj had engaged in a bitter war of words for months on social media over their difference of opinion.
Lamba is the third member of AAP active on social media to have distanced herself from the party, after Kumar Vishwas and Kapil Mishra. The lawmaker from Chandni Chowk in December last year stated that she had been asked to resign by the AAP leadership because of her open dissent against the proposal for taking back Rajiv Gandhi’s Bharat Ratna. The controversy, which hit the AAP, was condemned nationwide. The proposal was made by an MLA in the assembly while passing a resolution on the 1984 riots.
Lamba had served in various posts in the National Students’ Union of India and the Youth Congress in Delhi before joining AAP. She had earlier claimed that a dozen other MLAs from AAP would switch sides along with her because they were fed up with the “disrespectful” attitude of Delhi chief minister and AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal.
Differences
Last December, Alka Lamba, MLA from Chandni Chowk, had stated that she had been asked to resign by the AAP leadership because of her opposition to a party resolution asking for Rajiv Gandhi’s Bharat Ratna award to be taken back.