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As the INDIA bloc’s partners gathered in Delhi on Monday, the Aam Aadmi Party not only stayed away from any new 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 — which the party formally exited in 2025 barring issue-based support thereafter to the wider Opposition — had “no future” so long as the Congress led it. “[Congress] said on one hand that we would fight as an alliance and back each other, but behind the scenes [it] appears to be with the BJP,” Bharti said.
The INDIA bloc 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.
Bharti’s 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. Bharti also said that after drawing a blank in the 2025 Delhi assembly polls, Congress leaders celebrated AAP’s loss to the BJP.
The Delhi battle he invoked is, however, not the complete story. The one big state where Arvind Kejriwal’s party and the Congress remain locked in a live, direct contest is Punjab.
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The AAP captured Punjab in 2022, winning 92 of its 117 assembly seats and displacing the incumbent Congress, which is now the main opposition.
Even in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls thereafter, while the two parties allied as INDIA bloc partners in Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Chandigarh and Goa, they fought separately in Punjab. Of the 13 Lok Sabha seats of Punjab, the Congress won seven and AAP three (with one going to the Shiromani Akali Dal, two to Independents). That contest sharpened in the assembly bypolls that followed. No pact could later be reached in the Haryana assembly polls of 2024 too, with both blaming the other for breakdown of talks.
The most recent verdict reinforced the pattern in Punjab. 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 elections, 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.
“AAP and Congress are the two main parties in the contest at the moment in Punjab,” said Ashutosh Kumar, professor political science at Panjab University, Chandigarh. He added that the AAP has also been looking for more space in Haryana, Goa, Gujarat and other states, “at the cost of the Congress mainly”.
Historian and political columnist Harjeshwar Pal Singh noted, “In almost all the states in which the AAP has made a breakthrough — Delhi, Punjab, Gujarat, Goa — it has largely been through the space originally occupied by the Congress.” He said both AAP and Congress consistently have a “tactical, not strategic or ideological” approach towards allying with the other.
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, it even said the Congress should be ousted from the INDIA bloc.
On Monday, Congress leaders said 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 Mann, however, has repeatedly jibed that in Punjab and Delhi, “mothers could tell their children the shortest story: Once there used to be Congress”.
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. But it did not return to the bloc as such.
Punjab is among the states now seeing a Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls, for polls at the start of 2027. That’s in about eight months or so.
Another party in a somewhat similar situation was the Trinamool Congress, with a complicated relationship with ‘INDIA’ in the three years of the bloc’s formation. TMC leader Mamata Banerjee did, however, attend the bloc’s meeting as she is facing a massive rebellion within the party she founded in 1998, having lost power in Bengal to the BJP. 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.
Aarish Chhabra is an Associate Editor with the Hindustan Times online team, writing news reports and explanatory articles, besides overseeing coverage for the website. His career spans nearly two decades across India's most respected newsrooms in print, digital, and broadcast. He has reported, written, and edited across formats — from breaking news and live election coverage, to analytical long-reads and cultural commentary — building a body of work that reflects both editorial rigour and a deep curiosity about the society he writes for. Aarish studied English literature, sociology and history, besides journalism, at Panjab University, Chandigarh, and started his career in that city, eventually moving to Delhi. He is also the author of ‘The Big Small Town: How Life Looks from Chandigarh’, a collection of critical essays originally serialised as a weekly column in the Hindustan Times, examining the culture and politics of a city that is far more than its famous architecture — and, in doing so, holding up a mirror to modern India. In stints at the BBC, The Indian Express, NDTV, and Jagran New Media, he worked across formats and languages; mainly English, also Hindi and Punjabi. He was part of the crack team for the BBC Explainer project replicated across the world by the broadcaster. At Jagran, he developed editorial guides and trained journalists on integrity and content quality. He has also worked at the intersection of journalism and education. At the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, he developed a website that simplified academic research in management. At Bennett University's Times School of Media in Noida, he taught students the craft of digital journalism: from newsgathering and writing, to social media strategy and video storytelling. Having moved from a small town to a bigger town to a mega city for education and work, his intellectual passions lie at the intersection of society, politics, and popular culture — a perspective that informs both his writing and his view of the world. When not working, he is constantly reading long-form journalism or watching brainrot content, sometimes both at the same time.
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