In a blow to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Haryana, Ashok Tanwar, its former election campaign committee chairman, joined the BJP on Sunday in the presence of the state’s Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar at the BJP headquarters in Delhi.

Tanwar, who was earlier with the Congress, has cited the “current political scenario” and “Arvind Kejriwal’s alignment” with the Indian National Congress” as a key factor behind his move.

आम आदमी पार्टी से मेरा इस्तीफा..!!@ArvindKejriwal pic.twitter.com/zzar2NLwP8

— Ashok Tanwar (@Tanwar_Indian) January 18, 2024

Saying that it was his “good fortune to join the BJP ahead of the Ayodhya consecration ceremony”, Tanwar added that “people were impressed with the work done by Modi to improve India’s standing and lift the living standards of crores of people.”

“We will all work to ensure that all records are broken and the BJP’s tally reaches over 400 in the Lok Sabha elections,” he added.

Sources told The Indian Express that the leader had been “estranged” from the AAP for a while now and was expecting a Rajya Sabha ticket from the party.

Kurukshetra AAP district president Jagbir Jognakhera, who is an associate of Tanwar, had told The Indian Express on January 12 that he and several other associates of Tanwar had already resigned from the party.

Jognakhera said: “Tanwar has not been receiving due respect in the AAP… The party is in the hands of inexperienced people and workers are just numbers for them”.

Tanwar, a Dalit, was once considered one of the rising young Congress stars, and close to senior party leader Rahul Gandhi. After heading the Congress’s students wing, the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), for two years from 2003, Tanwar, who studied in JNU, became the Indian Youth Congress president for a five-year period in 2005 at the age of 29.

His wife Avantika too is seen as close to the Gandhi family. Her parents Geetanjali and Lalit Maken were gunned down by Sikh extremists in Delhi in 1985, and the Gandhi family took care of her as a child.

In the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, Tanwar had been fielded by the Congress from the Sirsa reserved constituency, which he won with a massive margin. In February 2014, the Congress leadership appointed Tanwar as the Haryana Congress president.

However, Tanwar kept running up against Haryana Congress heavyweight and ex-CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda. While the latter’s attempts to remove him were unsuccessful due to Tanwar’s proximity with Rahul, in September 2019, a month before the Assembly polls, Congress president Sonia Gandhi finally replaced Tanwar to to avert a split in the state unit. She named ex-Union minister Kumari Selja, another Dalit leader, as the new state chief. An upset Tanwar had reacted by staging a protest in front of Sonia Gandhi’s New Delhi residence along with his supporters.

In the 2019 Assembly polls that followed, he had openly supported many candidates of the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) of Dushyant Chautala. Subsequently, barely a fortnight before the polls, Tanwar had resigned from the Congress.

While his exit is believed to have dented the Congress’s prospects as the party’s opponents projected it as “an injustice to an emerging young Dalit politician”, it was a setback for Tanwar too, who found himself relegated to the margins of Haryana politics after having been at its centre stage for several years.

In February 2021, Tanwar formed his socio-political outfit Apna Bharat Morcha but, months later, joined the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in the presence of its chairperson and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

In April 2022, Tanwar quit the TMC, which failed to generate any buzz in Haryana, and joined the AAP. At the time, Tanwar’s supporters were very happy, seeing the move as a “turning point” in his political career. They took heart from the AAP’s stunning sweep in the Assembly elections in neighbouring Punjab just months earlier.