As the INDIA bloc’s partners gathered in Delhi on Monday, the Aam Aadmi Party not only stayed away from any alignment with it but also sharpened its attack on the Congress, the largest Opposition party that leads the alliance.
AAP leader Somnath Bharti outright declared that the alliance had “no future” so long as the Congress led it. The meeting at the heart of the attack was held in the national capital, but the fight that keeps the two parties estranged lies further northward in the immediate — in Punjab.
“[Congress] said on one hand that we would fight as an alliance and back each other, but behind the scenes you appear to be with the BJP,” Bharti said.
Grouses
His stated grievances were specific to Delhi; he recalled that AAP and the Congress had split the capital’s seven Lok Sabha seats on a 3:4 formula in 2024, and said that while Arvind Kejriwal had openly campaigned for the three Congress seats, no Congress leader other than Rahul Gandhi sought votes for AAP’s four. The BJP won all seven.
“What kind of alliance is that?” Bharti said, also noting that after drawing a blank in the 2025 Delhi assembly polls too, Congress leaders celebrated AAP’s loss to the BJP. “The Congress does not know how to honour the code of alliance,” Bharti asserted.
The Delhi battle Bharti invoked is, however, old story now. The one big state where Arvind Kejriwal’s party and the Congress remain locked in a live, direct contest is Punjab.
The AAP captured Punjab in 2022, winning 92 of its 117 assembly seats and displacing the incumbent Congress. Even in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls thereafter, the two parties allied as INDIA bloc partners in Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Chandigarh and Goa, but fought Punjab separately, contesting each other across all 13 seats; the Congress won seven and AAP three. The contest sharpened in the bypolls that followed.
The most recent verdict reinforced the pattern. In the municipal polls last month, the ruling AAP won nearly half of the 1,977 wards, with the Congress a distant second below 400. This came as succour as the AAP had suffered a setback within its ranks after six of its seven Rajya Sabha MPs from Punjab — led by Raghav Chadha — switched to the BJP a couple of months ago.
Both the AAP and Congress are now preparing for the 2027 assembly election, and for Kejriwal’s party, Punjab is its last major bastion. Punjab Congress leaders have long argued that an alliance with AAP would only revive the Akali Dal or the BJP, and erode the party’s own base.
The AAP was not among the parties at the Constitution Club meeting also because it has formally quit the bloc in July 2025, though it later co-opposed the BJP-led regime in Parliament. At one point before that, in late 2024, the AAP even said the Congress should be ousted from the INDIA bloc.
On Monday, Congress leaders said opposition parties’s absentees at the alliance meeting had effectively “merged” with the BJP and called them weak. The Congress was projected at the meeting as the “glue” of the 23-party bloc.
Punjab CM Bhagwant, however, has repeatedly jibed that in Punjab and Delhi, “mothers could tell their children the shortest story: Once there used to be Congress”.
Yet, in sync by the precarious formula of the INDIA bloc — together at national level, not necessarily at the state level — the AAP last year joined a united opposition’s campaign against the revision of electoral rolls.
Punjab is among the states now seeing a Special Intensive Revision, set to go to polls at the start of 2027. That’s in about eight months or so.
Another party in a similar situation not long ago was the Trinamool Congress, with a complicated relationship with the INDIA bloc. Its leader Mamata Banerjee did, however, attend the bloc’s meeting as she is facing a massive rebellion within the party she founded in 1998. Kejriwal had called on her as she arrived in Delhi on the eve of the meeting. But they had their own reasons to attend the meeting or not.
