There are many small-time politicians who have by chance become one-time MLAs. All parties have already declared their candidates, how can any party change their candidates once they have been announced?
On Sunday, Congress’s Arvinder Singh Lovely resigned from the post of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee President citing unease with the alliance between his party and the AAP. Saman Husain speaks to him about the reasons behind his departure, the alliance with AAP, and his next steps
If he thinks that the alliance was formed due to my initiatives, then he must consider me to be a really big leader, so much so that they didn’t listen to Sonia ji or Rahul ji but ended up being part of the alliance because of me. Do you think that I will be the one to take the alliance forward and then not keep a Lok Sabha seat for myself? The INDIA bloc was formed in April, back when the first meeting took place in Patna. I was not president of DPCC at that point of time. The second meeting took place in Bengaluru, and I was still not the president at that point in time. The third meeting took place in Mumbai and I was still not president of DPCC. I became the president on September 1, and right after that Sanjay Singh was imprisoned. Then how does he know that the alliance was formed because of me?
This feeling against the alliance is rooted in the fact that Ajay Maken did a press conference on Kejriwal’s ‘Sheesh Mahal’… the DPCC president before me, Anil Chaudhary, had registered an FIR against (Kejriwal), Sandeep Dikshit had openly opposed the alliance — even though I never openly criticised it, these facts are not hidden from anyone… Nonetheless, the high command made a decision to go forward with the alliance so I tried my best to ensure the whole party fell in line. On the night when Kejriwal was arrested, I visited his house, and I also took Sandeep Dikshit and Subhash Chopra along with me due to the high command’s directions. Do you think Sandeep Dikshit, against whose mother the AAP had been putting allegations, would visit Kejriwal’s house had there not been any pressure from the high command? There, I said that I was against the timing of the arrest; we never gave them a clean chit.
Which old party leaders would have been a better fit for the Lok Sabha candidature as opposed to Udit Raj and Kanhaiya Kumar?
I do not want to comment on this because right now this is not the issue. I will also go into the merits of candidates someday but currently the issue is, and my only grudge, is that when you’re announcing candidates, you should at least informally inform the DPCC about your final decision. Just as everybody else got to know about the final candidates through the media, so did I. Despite being DPCC president, I was not informed; there is a basic dignity that should be maintained.