Delhi Lok Sabha Elections 2024: Hours after Arvinder Singh Lovely resigned as Delhi Congress chief, the party's former MLA Asif Mohammad Khan on Sunday claimed that he would be fielded by the BJP from the East Delhi Lok Sabha seat. Khan claimed the BJP would replace Harsh Malhotra, the current party candidate from East Delhi, with Arvinder Singh Lovely.
"There might be differences in the party. If Lovely was disappointed and wanted to resign, he should have silently gone to Mallikarjun Kharge ji and resigned. If his intentions were not bad he would have silently tendered his resignation. In a way, he has issued that letter openly to the media is directly benefitting the BJP. I can say this, in the place of Harsh Malhotra, Lovely will be declared candidate within one or two days," Khan said while speaking to reporters.
Lovely resigned as the party's Delhi unit chief, citing the alliance with the AAP as one of the reasons. He said the Delhi Congress unit was against the alliance with the AAP but the party high command went ahead with it. In his resignation letter sent to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Lovely also said that all unanimous decisions taken by the senior Delhi unit leaders have been "unilaterally vetoed" by AICC Delhi in-charge Deepak Babria.
"It is with a heavy heart that I write the present letter to you finding myself handicapped and unable to continue as the President of the Delhi Party Unit," he said in his letter to Kharge. Lovely was appointed as the Delhi Congress chief in August last year. He resigned from the Congress in 2017 and joined the BJP but returned to the party within a year.
Lovely also criticised Congress North East Delhi candidate Kanhaiya Kumar for praising Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who has been lodged in jail in a money laundering case. "The candidate from North-East Delhi has also been giving media bytes falsely praising the Delhi CM, in direct contravention of the party line and the local party workers' beliefs," he said, adding that Kanhaiya endorsed the "false propaganda of AAP in regard to the supposed works done by them in education, health, road and electricity sectors."
Trouble has been brewing in the Delhi unit of Congress over the candidature of Kanhaiya Kumar from North East Delhi and Udit Raj from North West Delhi.
The Delhi Congress workers protested against Kanhaiya Kumar after Lovely resigned. The party workers stood outside Kanhaiya Kumar's newly inaugurated office, holding black posters with "need local candidate not outsider" written on them.
Lovely said the announcement of the candidature of Kanhaiya Kumar and Udit Raj, who is contesting from the North West Delhi seat, was not taken well by Congress leaders and workers, who consider them as "outsiders".
In the 2019 elections, the Congress had fielded Lovely against BJP's Gautam Gambhir and AAP's Atishi from the East Delhi constituency. This time, he did not get a ticket as the Congress is contesting on 3 seats as part of the alliance with the AAP.