Delhi Congress Chief Arvinder Singh Lovely Resigns, Cites Disagreement with Party's AAP Alliance

In a setback to the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, senior leader Arvinder Singh Lovely has resigned as the party’s Delhi unit chief, citing the alliance with the AAP as one of the reasons.

He said the Delhi Congress unit was against the alliance but the party high command went ahead with it.

In his resignation letter sent to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Saturday, Lovely also said that all unanimous decisions taken by the senior Delhi unit leaders have been ”unilaterally vetoed” by AICC Delhi in-charge Deepak Babria.

This comes days after former Delhi minister and AICC member Rajkumar Chauhan resigned from the party following an altercation with Babria.

In his letter to Kharge, Lovely said, ”It is with a heavy heart that I write the present letter to you finding myself handicapped and unable to continue as the President of the Delhi Party Unit.” ”I had gratefully accepted the role as the DPCC President with the sole objective of supporting the local Congress party workers with whom I have an extremely close connection and life-long association.

”However, since I cannot protect the interests of the party workers, I see no reason to continue in the said post. Therefore, with great regret and an extremely leaden heart, I, Arvinder Singh Lovely, do hereby tender my resignation from the post of DPCC President,” he said.

A minister in the Sheila Dikshit government, Lovely was appointed as the Delhi Congress chief in August last year.

Lovely said even though the Delhi Congress unit was against the alliance with the AAP, he publicly backed it and made sure that the entire unit ”fell in line with the high command’s final order”.