LOVELY RETURNS TO CONGRESS, SAYS HE WAS ‘MISFIT’ IN BJP
NEW DELHI: Former Delhi Congress chief Arvinder Singh Lovely was reinducted into the party on Saturday, almost ten months after he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP). The official announcement of Singh’s rejoining was made after he called on Congress president Rahul Gandhi along with Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken.
NEW DELHI: Former Delhi Congress chief Arvinder Singh Lovely was reinducted into the party on Saturday, almost ten months after he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP).
The official announcement of Singh’s rejoining was made after he called on Congress president Rahul Gandhi along with Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken.
“Congress president Rahul Gandhi welcomes Arvinder Singh ‘Lovely’ back into the Congress family,” a tweet from the party’s official handle said, sharing Lovely’s picture with Gandhi.
After the formal joining, Lovely said he “felt like a misfit” in the BJP.
“I was ideologically a misfit in the BJP. Once I realised it, I told myself, I should do as much as I can for my parent party, which I left during a weak moment. There were communication gaps. But when I spoke to Ajay Maken, we sorted out all our issues,” the 48-year-old leader said. Lovely, a key minister in the Sheila Dikshit government in Delhi, joined the BJP in April 2017 along with the state youth Congress chief Amit Malik ahead of the municipal polls.
His return is seen as a boost for the Congress ahead of the likely bypolls to 20 assembly seats of Delhi, which have fallen vacant after Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) lawmakers were disqualified for holding office of profit. A case challenging the disqualification is pending in the Delhi high court.
It is also being seen as part of the Congress’s efforts to bring veteran leaders together in the national capital where the party faced a drubbing in the 2015 assembly polls without winning even a single seat, having remained in power for 15 years. The incumbent AAP won 67 seats in the 70-member house.
Last week, former chief minister Sheila Dikshit and Ajay Maken, who had been at loggerheads, put up a united show during a press conference highlighting the “failures” of the Arvind Kejriwal government on its third anniversary. Maken said he should have brought Dikshit on board earlier, admitting he had “committed a few mistakes but was rectifying them”.
Since the Congress defeat in 2015, Dikshit had stayed away from Delhi politics. She had even questioned Maken’s style of functioning and blamed him for Lovely’s exit. Calling Lovely a “soldier” for his contribution to the party, Maken on Saturday admitted to the communication gap within the party ahead of the 2017 Delhi municipal elections.