Kunwar Vijay Pratap quits Punjab Assembly; three AAP MLAs set to join BJP

Chandigarh. Three Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs quit on Sunday and are set to join the BJP in New Delhi on Monday, months before the February Assembly polls. Sources said BJP national president Nitin Nabin may induct them himself.

Suspended Amritsar North MLA Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh resigned his Assembly seat. Samana MLA Chetan Singh Jouramajra and Sanaur MLA Harmeet Singh Pathanmajra resigned from the party’s primary membership.

AAP has played down the exits. Senior party leader Baltej Pannu said Jouramajra and Pathanmajra had already been sidelined by the party, while Kunwar had been suspended long ago, so their exit makes little difference to AAP.

Big boost for BJP

For the BJP, the move is a major boost ahead of the elections. The party will contest on its own this time and has struggled to find winnable faces across the state’s 117 seats.

It has long relied on leaders from other parties. Its state president, Kewal Singh Dhillon, is a former two-time Congress MLA. His predecessor, Sunil Jakhar, once headed the Punjab Congress. After Congress, the BJP is now drawing from AAP.

All three MLAs have had troubled pasts with AAP, but each has a firm hold in his constituency. Kunwar won Amritsar North in 2022 by over 28,000 votes. More AAP leaders left out of the candidate lists could follow them.

In a social media message to voters, the former IPS officer said he had met 90% of the targets he set as an MLA. “My biggest achievement is that I ended the ‘mai-baap’ culture in politics,” he said.

Left out of first list

AAP released its first list of 40 candidates on Saturday. Jouramajra, a former minister, and Pathanmajra were not on it. The party had already named new constituency in-charges in Samana and Sanaur.

On Sunday morning, AAP suspended both MLAs for anti-party activities, hours before they announced their exit at the Chandigarh Press Club. The party said it will ask the Speaker to cancel their Assembly membership.

Kunwar, who hails from Bihar, is a 1998-batch IPS officer of the Punjab cadre. He headed the SIT that probed the 2015 Kotkapura police firing. After the Punjab and Haryana High Court quashed his probe report in April 2021, he took premature retirement and joined AAP.

His differences with the party began soon after he became an MLA. In January 2023, he quit as chairman of the Assembly’s committee on government assurances, unhappy with how the sacrilege and Behbal Kalan firing cases were being handled. He kept targeting Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann. In June 2025, AAP suspended him for five years after he questioned the Vigilance Bureau’s arrest of Akali leader Bikram Singh Majithia.

The Speaker will now decide on all three: Kunwar’s resignation and AAP’s plea to disqualify Jouramajra and Pathanmajra.