After the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) suffered a massive drubbing in the recently concluded MCD polls, the fissure in the Arvind Kejriwal-led party have widened. The crisis in the party is deepening day by day. The poll-battered party into turmoil as there is a tug of war going on between top AAP party leadership.
On 2 April, senior AAP leader Kumar Vishwas hinted at quitting the party. Blaming the “coterie” within AAP for a series of poll debacle, Vishwas alleged that a section of party colleagues are hatching conspiracy against him.
The development came days after party MLA Amanatullah Khan called Vishwas a “RSS-BJP agent” and said that he was plotting a coup against Arvind Kejriwal. Khan had resigned from the party’s Political Affairs Committee (PAC). Vishwas was adamant that Khan being sacked from the party.
The poet-turned-politician said Khan is being just a “mask” used by some AAP leaders to attack him. “This is not being said by an MLA…he is only a mask and someone else is speaking behind him,” Vishwas said pointing fingers at Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia.
“A lot of tarnishing of image will take place. Let me tell those hatching conspiracies that I will not let this happen. I will take a decision in a day,” he said.
Earlier, several AAP MLAs met Vishwas seeking to pacify him. But that appeared to have yielded no results.
Following Vishwas’s attack on AAP leadership, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia hit back at him saying the party leadership strongly disapproves Vishwas’s statements.
“I am really upset with the statement of Kumar Vishwas. He should raise his concerns at the party forum instead of speaking to media,” Sisodia told reporters.
This is the second attack by Kumar Viswas on party leadership following the MCD poll defeat. Speaking to a private TV channel, Viswas had earlier questioned Kejriwal’s move to hide behind his imaginary “EVM tampering” blabber for the party’s poor show. Following this AAP supporters hurled filthy abuses at each other on Twitter over Kumar Vishwas.
Amid the flurry of developments, Kejriwal and Sisodia met Vishwas at his residence in Delhi on late last night, but failed to pacify him.
The fresh tug of war in the party is a reminiscent of the 2015 bitter public spat involving Kejriwal, Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan, which had resulted in the duo quitting the party.
Now, after a series of poll drubbing, Arvind Kejriwal is struggling to keep the party together.