Two words have dominated Punjab’s political conversation since Friday, when seven Aam Aadmi Party Rajya Sabha MPs announced they were leaving the party to merge with the BJP. One is ‘gaddar’ — the Arabic-origin Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi word for traitor. The other is the Persian-origin ‘baahri’, for ‘outsider’.
Both words have history beyond their etymology too, and both are being deployed by multiple political sides at once, after Raghav Chadha caused the latest rupture in the party currently ruling Punjab.
How it played out on the ground in Punjab
On Saturday, AAP workers spray-painted ‘gaddar’ — though they used varied spellings — on the outer walls and main gate of ex-cricketer Harbhajan Singh’s residence in Jalandhar; on the walls outside AAP’s ex-strategist Sandeep Pathak’s house in Ludhiana; and at the main entrance of the Phagwara campus of Lovely Professional University, owned by industrialist Ashok Kumar Mittal.
Protesters also raised slogans of “Punjab de gaddar” (‘traitors of Punjab’) outside the residence of Rajinder Gupta, another industrialist who was sent to the Rajya Sabha by Arvind Kejriwal’s party.
AAP’s Punjab unit shared videos of the protests on X, saying “sharp protest demonstrations” had been held “at various places against the Rajya Sabha members who fell at the feet of BJP by betraying Punjab”.
CM Bhagwant Mann, a comic-turned-politician known for quips, used the same words — “traitors of Punjab — in Chandigarh on Friday. “These six-seven MPs were not the party. They were not mass leaders. None of them is capable of becoming even a village sarpanch!”.
Mann’s sabzi quip, Chadha’s defence
He posted on Facebook later, in Punjabi: “Ginger, garlic, cumin, fenugreek powder, red chilli, black pepper and coriander — these 7 things together make a dish great, but they cannot make a sabzi on their own.”
He called the whole affair a BJP-engineered ‘Operation Lotus’, a popular term referencing the poll symbol of the Centre’s ruling party.
In Delhi, where the switch happened, AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh said: “What wasn’t given to [these leaders] by the public and AAP? We have been backstabbed. The people of Punjab will not forgive this treachery.”
Manish Sisodia, posting on X from Gujarat where he said he had been working for the party for three days, wrote that “some traitors have struck a deal with the hard-earned blood and sweat of Punjab’s workers”. He added, “Punjab never forgives traitors.”
Kejriwal only posted one line, saying that “Punjabi have been betrayed”.
Raghav Chadha, for his part, rejected the ‘gaddar’ framing directly. “Those who are saying this — especially the Aam Aadmi Party leaders — that we left out of fear: we left not out of fear but after being disappointed with the party. We left not out of fear but disgusted,” he told news agency ANI on Saturday. He called the party and its leaders “corrupt and compromised”.
‘Baahri’ echoed in 2022 too
The ‘outsider’ argument has a longer tail — one that leads back, precisely, to March 2022, when the AAP won 92 of 117 Punjab assembly seats, and went on to fill its Rajya Sabha nominations.
Two of its first picks drew immediate criticism: Chadha, a Delhi resident who is ethnically a Punjabi Hindu, and Pathak, who is from Chhattisgarh.
The other nominees were Harbhajan Singh, and businessmen Ashok Mittal and Sanjeev Arora, all Punjabis but largely out of the political or AAP spheres.
Navjot Singh Sidhu, then a Congress leader, posted on X the same week, “New batteries for the Delhi remote control. It’s blinking.” He listed Harbhajan as an exception. Sidhu happens to be an ex-cricketer too. “Betrayal of Punjab!” Sidhu wrote.
Moosewala’s verse returns
Singer Sidhu Moosewala, who had contested the 2022 assembly election on a Congress ticket from Mansa and lost, released a song called ‘Scapegoat’ in April 2022, days after the nominations were announced.
Two lines from it, in Punjabi — “Tell me who is responsible for what happened with the Rajya Sabha? Oh people, tell me now, who is the traitor?” — were posted without comment on Facebook on Friday by Moosewala’s father Balkaur Singh, hours after the defection was announced. The song, which has over 65 million views on YouTube, was written by Moosewala, who was murdered allegedly by gangsters in May 2022.
Balkaur Singh had used the same lines in a similar political context in 2023, when Sandeep Pathak made statements on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal issue that drew criticism in Punjab for allegedly giving Haryana a political foothold on the issue.
‘Knew it since 2022’
Opposition parties in Punjab said on Saturday that the defection was foreseeable since those 2022 nominations.
Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader Maheshinder Singh Grewal said, “They failed to curb corruption and are themselves deeply mired in it, with Rajya Sabha tickets said to have been sold… The people are not blind; they have already made up their minds well before the 2027 elections.”
Amarinder Singh Raja Warring, chief of the Punjab Congress which is the main opposition party in the assembly, said: “The AAP has no ideology. This was natural.”
He added, “These MPs have no relevance in Punjab. AAP should remain aware — their 50 MLAs might join the BJP next!”
Partap Singh Bajwa, Leader of the Opposition in the Punjab assembly, described the defection as an internal power struggle for the AAP “rather than an ideological shift”.
Some criticism came come from within the AAP too.
Malvinder Singh Kang, a Lok Sabha MP from Anandpur Sahib, told The Indian Express on Saturday that the party had gone wrong on Chadha specifically.
“I feel the party made a mistake by giving him so much power. We should have kept a check on Raghav Chadha,” he said, “There’s no two opinions on this. We put Raghav Chadha on a pedestal.”
Kang also said he personally observed Chadha interfering in CM Mann’s decisions — something the party has denied in the past when Chadha was called “super CM” by opposition parties.
Kang also said the party should have considered “ground-level leaders from Punjab” for the Rajya Sabha seats.
One remains, why others left
Of AAP’s original seven Punjab MPs in the Rajya Sabha, only one remains: Balbir Singh Seechewal, a Padma Shri-winning environmentalist from Jalandhar district known for organising the cleanup of the 160-km Kali Bein rivulet. He has made no public statement on the defection, as yet.
Among the seven who defected, Rajinder Gupta is also a Padma Shri awardee, having received the honour in 2007 for contributions to trade and industry. Gupta, founder of the Trident Group, had been elected to the Rajya Sabha from Punjab only in November 2025, unopposed, after Sanjeev Arora shifted to the state government as a minister and became an MLA.
Political analyst Harjeshwar Singh, a professor of history at Sri Guru Gobind Singh College, Chandigarh, said that when there is no strong ideology, “and people are chosen based on wealth, business background, or influence… such situations are bound to rise”.
Mittal, for instance, recently faced raids from central agency ED at his businesses, after he had been made AAP’s deputy RS leader replacing Chadha.
What BJP gains, what Bittu said
The BJP, which currently has two MLAs in Punjab’s 117-seat assembly, welcomed the defecting MPs. Punjab BJP chief Sunil Jakhar said they had “at the right time, chosen to leave the sinking ship of AAP”.
Note, however, that Union minister Ravneet Singh Bittu — a BJP recruit from the Congress like Jakhar — had said just last week there was “no need” for Chadha to join the BJP as he was “already doing the work he’s doing.” He also made fun of Chadha as “a man who does catwalk” — a reference to Chadha having walked the ramp at Lakme Fashion Week in 2022.
The BJP has announced it will contest the 2027 Punjab assembly elections alone, a position Union home minister Amit Shah stated at a Moga rally in March.
The BJP secured around 19% of Punjab’s vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections contesting alone, but won no seats. It now has six MPs from the state, rather suddenly. The seventh AAP MP to have made the switch is Delhi’s Swati Maliwal, who had a running dispute with Kejriwal for two years already,
AAP’s Punjab youth wing leader Parminder Goldy, leading a protest outside Rajinder Gupta’s residence on Saturday, said the BJP was “attempting to destabilise” the party.
The party has, meanwhile, filed a complaint with the Rajya Sabha chairman seeking disqualification of the seven MPs. Legal experts have noted that the two-thirds threshold invoked by the group is likely to shield them from action under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution.
