In April 2022, when Raghav Chadha was elected to the Rajya Sabha, he was viewed as a rising star in Indian politics. Only 33, he was the youngest member in the Upper House. Chadha’s rapid rise was seen through the prism of the growth of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the kind of politics the party claimed it stood for.

The AAP, which emerged from the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement, came with the promise of cleansing the political system. It was meant to be the party of the “aam aadmi”, one that would work for the issues of ordinary people. In the lead was Arvind Kejriwal, one of the key figures behind the IAC movement. The former Indian Revenue Service officer and transparency activist was himself seen as the quintessential common man.

Amongst the motley group that formed the original AAP team was Chadha, who, much like Kejriwal, his party boss and mentor, came from an apolitical background. During the IAC movement in 2011, Chadha, who had just qualified as a chartered accountant, met Kejriwal for the first time and expressed his wish to put in a few hours of work every week on a voluntary basis for the IAC cause.

Having started out as a volunteer in the Anna movement, the articulate Chadha became the face of the AAP on television news channels. He went on to get important assignments in the party and was amongst its key strategists. He was seen as enjoying close proximity to Kejriwal, and his rapid rise in the AAP was attributed by many in the party to this.

The swift ascent

Chadha became the AAP’s youngest national spokesperson shortly after the party’s formation. He was appointed national treasurer of the party at the age of 26, after the AAP’s landslide victory in the 2015 Delhi Assembly election. He was in the party’s manifesto drafting team for the Assembly election in Delhi in 2013. In March 2020, he was appointed Vice Chairman of the Delhi Jal Board.

He had unsuccessfully contested the Lok Sabha election from the South Delhi constituency in 2019. He got elected to the Delhi Vidhan Sabha in 2020, winning from the Rajinder Nagar constituency.

Chadha was appointed co-in charge of party affairs in Punjab in December 2020. He was credited with having played a key role in the AAP’s strategy for the Assembly election in the State in 2022, in which the party registered a big win, securing 92 out of 117 seats.

After the Punjab victory, Chadha was appointed chairman of an advisory panel to Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann. Critics, though, said he was the “super CM” who represented the control of the AAP’s Delhi leadership on the party’s affairs in Punjab. Chadha’s subsequent appointment to the Rajya Sabha, where he represents Punjab, was viewed as a reward for his contribution to the party’s electoral success in the State and pointed to his soaring prominence as a key strategist.

Chadha was in the national limelight as he accompanied Kejriwal to meetings of the opposition INDIA bloc in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.

From blue-eyed boy to outcast

The 37-year-old Chadha’s journey from being the AAP’s blue-eyed boy to its target of attacks is also a mirror to the party’s political journey over the past decade and a half. In happier days, Chadha described himself as “a student of the Arvind Kejriwal school of politics”. He would say that for someone like him, who came from a non-political family, to be able to get the kind of opportunities he did was possible only in the AAP.

In stark contrast, he was unceremoniously removed by the AAP as its Deputy Leader in the Rajya Sabha on April 2 and has been engaged in a war of words with his own party colleagues since.

The AAP has described the move against Chadha as routine disciplinary action and accused him of not following the party line in Parliament. AAP leaders have attacked Chadha for allegedly not walking out of the Rajya Sabha along with the rest of the opposition and refusing to sign the opposition’s notice seeking the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

In response, Chadha has, in videos posted on social media, hit out at the party for allegedly trying to silence his voice in Parliament and claimed that he was not approached by anyone to sign the notice against the CEC.

The charges and counter-charges

Amongst the allegations levelled against Chadha by AAP leaders is that he has in recent times not raised any issues against the Narendra Modi government. They claim he has instead only indulged in an intensive public relations exercise in which he has raised eye-catching but soft issues in Parliament. His absence from the scene and his alleged efforts to stay under the radar when Kejriwal was arrested have also been highlighted by AAP leaders.

Chadha has hit back at the AAP, saying the party had launched a “scripted campaign” against him, and described the allegations as “blatant lies”. “I have gone to Parliament to make an impact and not create a ruckus,” he said.

“Every lie will be exposed. Ghayal hoon, isliye ghatak hoon [I am wounded, hence I am dangerous],” he said, borrowing a dialogue from the 2025 Hindi blockbuster Dhurandhar.

Chadha’s own visible distancing from the AAP’s activities, especially in the wake of the excise policy case, as also his distinct sidelining from decision-making in the party, according to political observers, has to be seen in the context of the party’s mounting political and electoral challenges.

He was conspicuously absent from the party’s protests when Kejriwal, then Chief Minister of Delhi, was arrested ahead of the Lok Sabha election in 2024 in connection with the alleged excise policy scam. At a time when every leader of the party was out on the streets in Delhi and in other States to protest Kejriwal’s arrest, Chadha’s absence gave rise to intense speculation about why he was missing at such a critical time. He explained his absence by stating that he was in London, where he was recuperating from a preventive eye surgery conducted to fix some retina spots.

In the backdrop of his marriage to actor Parineeti Chopra in September 2023, critics within the party accused him of leading an elitist lifestyle and distancing himself from the party’s struggles.

When Kejriwal was released from jail in September 2024, Chadha went to meet him, but the warmth between them had visibly evaporated. In February this year, Chadha was completely silent when a Delhi court discharged all 23 accused, including Kejriwal, in the excise policy case.

Chadha has been accused by his party colleagues of buckling under the BJP’s pressure and distancing himself from the party and its leadership to save his own skin. It is also said that he could be looking to join another party, and there has been a strong buzz for some time that he is headed to the BJP.

“Raghav Chadha, with his youthful appeal, celebrity wife, and rising social media profile, was seen as a threat, along with his perceived closeness to the BJP, and that has obviously not gone down well with the AAP leadership. His absence during the crucial time before the Lok Sabha election when its leaders, including Kejriwal, were behind bars also created mistrust between him and the top party leadership,” said political commentator Harjeshwar Pal Singh.

Singh said the Chadha episode is part of what he describes as a distinct pattern in the AAP—prominent leaders either leaving or getting ousted from the party, which, according to him, is being run in a highly centralised manner by Kejriwal.

“There is a familiar ring to the developments related to Raghav Chadha. The same pattern was seen in the case of leaders like Prashant Bhushan, Yogendra Yadav, Sucha Singh Chottepur, Kumar Vishwas, and Swati Maliwal,” he said.

The arc of a political start-up

Chadha’s rise was in sync with the AAP’s growth as a party that started out with a shock victory in Delhi, went on to win Punjab, and made its presence felt in other States, especially Gujarat and Goa. He benefitted from the rise of a political start-up, and his own image—that of a youngster from an apolitical family who went on to become politically prominent—was in keeping with the “aam aadmi” ethos of the party. His movement away from the AAP’s centrestage, and now his bitter falling out with the party, is being seen in the context of the party’s growing challenges and the many crisis situations it has faced of late.

Chadha continues to be a member of the national executive of the AAP and its national spokesperson. As his continuance in the AAP appears increasingly untenable, the party is said to be in no rush to take any extreme action against him, and his continuance in the Rajya Sabha, where his term ends in 2028, is expected to run its course.

In his book The Aam Aadmi Party: The Untold Story of a Political Uprising and Its Undoing, Sayantan Ghosh dedicated an entire chapter to “The Curious Case of Raghav Chadha”, in which he analysed what went wrong between him and the AAP.

“The evolving saga of Raghav Chadha within the AAP reflects broader themes in Indian politics: the delicate balance between central and State leadership, the rise and repositioning of young leaders, and the complex interplay of personal and political factors in shaping political careers,” wrote Ghosh, who has an insider’s perspective on the AAP, having worked as an associate fellow at the Delhi Assembly Research Centre, which involved close collaboration with the office of the then Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia.

“As the AAP continues to evolve, the trajectory of leaders like Chadha will remain a telling indicator of the party’s internal dynamics and future direction,” Ghosh wrote.

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