Rajya Sabha chief accepts merger of 7 AAP MPs with BJP

New Delhi: Union Congress president CP Radhakrishnan has formally accepted the merger of seven AAP MPs with the Bharatiya Janata Party, taking the party’s tally to 113 in the 245-member upper house.With the defections of Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, Ashok Mittal, Harbhajan Singh, Swati Maliwal, Vikramjit Sahney and Rajinder Gupta, AAP’s strength in RS is now 3. The RS website shows that these MPs are part of the Bharatiya Janata Party.On Monday, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said the chairman has accepted the merger of seven AAP MPs with the BJP. “Welcome to the nation-building NDA under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Modi and say goodbye to the ‘tukde-tukde’ INDI alliance,” he said.However, AAP MP Sanjay Singh, who wrote to Radhakrishnan on Sunday, in a separate letter on Monday asked the RS general secretary to clarify the basis on which AAP’s party position (number of MPs) was changed in the RS records.If this is not clarified, AAP will approach the court over this “unilateral decision”, Singh said. He said this was done “without any prior hint or consent from AAP or its leader in the House”.In his letter on Monday, Singh said any arbitrary change of the party’s position without following due process would have “serious consequences” for the rights of the party and its members. He sought an investigation.Meanwhile, some legal experts have stressed that the Tenth Schedule cannot stop political defections when they reach the scale of “merger”. The “merger” exception in paragraph 4 of the Schedule is provided in paragraph 2 for such merger to be effective if at least two-thirds of the Legislature agree.On his decision to leave AAP, Chadha said in a video message on Monday that the work environment at AAP had become “toxic”. He claimed that it was trapped in the hands of a few corrupt and compromised people who worked for personal gain.Congress MP Jairam Ramesh said the only surprising thing about the chairman’s decision was “it took so long”. “Until recently, the BJP raised questions about their integrity and claimed to have evidence, but now all that has been forgotten. The ED conducted raids on some people until recently, but you can bet these operations will stop now,” he said. “The lotus has become the lotus.”