A day after resigning from the Aam Aadmi Party, eight Delhi MLAs joined the Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday.

This comes less than a week before the Assembly elections in the national capital on February 5. The votes will be counted on February 8.

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

The eight MLAs joined the BJP in the presence of the Hindutva party’s Delhi chief Virendra Sachdeva and National Vice-President Baijayant Panda.

It was a historic day as the MLAs had freed themselves of the “AAPda [disaster]”, Panda said, adding that he hoped Delhi too would be freed from it after the polls.

Apart from 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 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 resignation letter to Aam Aadmi Party chief 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.

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.

The MLAs said that they had also submitted their resignation letters to the Assembly speaker, which relinquished their membership in the House, PTI reported.

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