New Delhi: Arvinder Singh Lovely, a Congress leader, who had switched loyalty to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has now rejoined the Congress Party, the party chief of Delhi Ajay Maken revealed on Saturday.
Lovely, previously a Congress leader joined the BJP in April, 2017. Within a year, the politician switched back to Congress. Since being elected in the Delhi Legislative Assembly in 1998, Lovely has never lost an election. He was re-elected for the fourth time into the assembly in 2013 from Gandhi Nagar constituency.
“The BJP was an ideologically misfit party for me. I am glad to be back in my parent party Congress,” Lovely said. He was welcomed back into the party by AICC in-charge of Delhi unit PC Chacko along with Maken.
Lovely joins the Congress at a time when rapprochement between Ajay Maken and Sheila Dikshit, always known to be rivals, seems likely. Maken had recently paid a visit to Dikshit at her Nizamuddin (East) residence inviting her to a media conference to list the ‘failures’ of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi.
Lovely’s return is seen as a shot in the arm for the Congress with 20 seats up for the grabs in Delhi bypolls. The by-elections were necessitated after an Election Commission recommended disqualification of 20 AAP MLAs for holding office of profit while serving as Parliamentary Secretaries between March 13, 2015, and September 8, 2016.
