Less than a week before the Delhi Assembly elections, seven Aam Aadmi Party MLAs resigned from the primary membership of the party on Friday.

They are Rohit Kumar Mehraulia, the outgoing MLA from Trilokpuri, Rajesh Rishi, who represents the Janakpuri constituency, Kasturba Nagar MLA Madan Lal, Mehrauli MLA Naresh Yadav, Bijwasan MLA Bhupinder Singh Joon, Palam MLA Bhavna Gaur and Adarsh Nagar MLA Pawan Sharma.

The Delhi Assembly elections are scheduled for February 5, with votes to be counted on February 8.

Apart from Naresh Yadav, none of the other legislators who resigned were given a ticket by the Aam Aadmi Party to fight the upcoming polls.

On December 20, the party replaced Yadav with Mahender Chaudhary as its Mehrauli candidate. This came after Yadav was convicted in a Quran desecration case.

The case dates back to June 24, 2016, when torn pages of the Quran were found in Punjab’s Malerkotla. The incident had triggered unrest and violence in the town.

In his letter to Aam Aadmi Party national convener Arvind Kejriwal, Yadav on Friday alleged that “corruption has infiltrated” the party.

Mehraulia, on his part, said that he had joined the Aam Aadmi Party during a movement against corruption led by social activist Anna Hazare so that he could secure social justice for the Dalit and Valmiki communities.

The party had promised to uplift these communities, Mehraulia said in his resignation letter. However, it failed to address several matters, such as scrapping contract-based labour and ensuring temporary workers were absorbed permanently, he added.

“I reached this conclusion with a lot of pain and sorrow, along with my colleagues,” Mehraulia told ANI. “We joined the party with a hope that this party will do clean politics and stand against corruption...Today, I have to say with a lot of pain that we have got nothing but fake assurances.”

In his resignation letter, Rishi claimed that the AAP had departed from its core values.

Claiming that the party had become a “cesspit of nepotism and corruption”, he criticised it for betraying the principles of a corruption-free and transparent government it was founded on.

Lal and Gaur, in their letters, told Kejriwal that they were resigning as they had lost faith in him and the party.

Speaking to ANI, Lal added that the party was moving away from its ideologies. “Even though we did not get tickets [to contest the Delhi elections], we stayed in the party for over one and a half months,” he said.

Lal added: “But those people to whom the party gave tickets, their performance, party's performance, it feels like the party made a mistake.”

Gaur told reporters that she was not angry about not getting a ticket in the upcoming elections.

“I have served the people of Palam and I am not upset regarding this,” she claimed. “Today, its convener [Kejriwal] wears spectacles through which he can only see what the people next to him are showing him and he listens to only what they say.”

Joon echoed the other legislators and added: “Candidate list came on December 9 and today is January 31. Amid this, we thought about this…The ideology with which AAP had come, it has moved away from.”

Reacting to the resignations, the Bharatiya Janata Party said that the residents of Delhi had made up their minds about who was going to win the upcoming polls.

“After getting tired of the corruption in their party, seven MLAs resigned today,” BJP MP Anurag Thakur said. “This shows that the people of Delhi have made up their minds. BJP is going to form government in Delhi.”

Congress leader Alka Lamba claimed that Kejriwal left his MLAs to earn money. “Their [Aam Aadmi Party’s] time has come,” she told reporters. “They will get defeated from all the seats...The party will get divided into two parts and only Arvind Kejriwal will be left.”

The Aam Aadmi Party won 62 of the 70 Assembly seats in the last state elections held in 2020.