AAP MP Sushil Rinku & MLA Sheetal Angural join BJP. Mukesh Aggarwal
Aditi Tandon
New Delhi, March 27
The exodus of Punjab politicians towards the BJP continued on Wednesday with Aam Aadmi Party’s lone Lok Sabha member from the state Sushil Kumar Rinku joining the saffron ranks along with AAP’s Jalandhar West MLA Sheetal Angural.
Rinku and Angural switched over after resigning from the AAP’s primary membership. Angural will resign as MLA on Thursday.
Punjab leaders who joined BJP since 2022
From Cong: Ex-CM Amarinder Singh; Punjab Congress ex-chief Sunil Jakhar; former ministers Manpreet Badal, Rana Gurmeet Sodhi, Sunder Sham Arora; MPs Preneet Kaur and Ravneet Bittu. Raj Kumar Verka, Gurpreet Kanger, Balbir Singh and Jeet Mohinder Sidhu also joined the BJP, but they later rejoined the Congress.
From AAP: MP Sushil Kumar Rinku and MLA Sheetal Angural
Joining a day after the BJP announced its decision to contest all 13 parliamentary segments in Punjab alone, Rinku said, “Being in the BJP, I finally see some hope for Jalandhar. I have no lust for power. I am conducting this new experiment with myself for the betterment of Punjab and Jalandhar.”
The move came as a severe jolt to ruling AAP in Punjab, which had named Rinku in its first list of eight candidates for the state. Rinku, a former Congress MLA, joined AAP in April 2023. He won the Jalandhar LS bypoll soon thereafter. The win in a traditional Congress bastion was seen as significant as it followed the party’s embarrassing loss in the Sangrur (vacated by CM Bhagwant Mann) bypoll in June 2022, soon after its sweep in the Assembly poll.
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