This Article is From Mar 02, 2015

AAP vs AAP: Amid Letter War, Party Says 'Clash of Ideas'

AAP vs AAP: Amid Letter War, Party Says 'Clash of Ideas'
New Delhi:

Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party will meet on Wednesday after a series of letters exposed a rift in its leadership. Sources say the party is likely to decide whether to remove founder members Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan from its top decision-making body.

Mr Yadav and Mr Bhushan, who are members of AAP's Political Affairs Committee (PAC), are expected to be removed from the panel days after they criticized the party's functioning and called for a restructuring.

"We have not offered to resign. We are not hungry for a post in the party," Mr Bhushan told NDTV this morning.

As the rift in AAP played out in a series of letters from both sides, Yogendra Yadav tweeted, "Let petty politics not come in the way of our greater purpose."

A new note today kept the crisis on the boil for a party that had till last month basked in its historic election victory in Delhi.

The note is a detailed rebuttal to a letter by AAP's Delhi secretary Dilip Pandey, which has accused Mr Yadav, Prashant Bhushan and Shanti Bhushan of "acting in concert towards a singular aim of weakening the party and then replacing Kejriwal with Yadav as party head."

Without addressing that allegation directly, today's note denies that Mr Yadav ever blamed Mr Kejriwal for the party's disastrous debut in the May national election. It also says Mr Yadav and Mr Bhushan never interfered in the party chief's decisions.

NDTV has accessed internal notes in which Mr Yadav and Mr Bhushan have summarized concerns about the functioning of AAP and called for changes.

One was a joint note by Mr Yadav and Mr Bhushan, written on February 26. A separate letter by Mr Bhushan on the same day was harsher, taking direct aim at Mr Kejriwal. "One-person-centric campaign is making our party look like other parties," wrote Mr Bhushan.

The letter written jointly by Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan:

The letter written by Prashant Bhushan:

He also alleged, "Our systems of accountability have become largely dysfunctional. Many volunteers complained to me they were brutally silenced when they complained about candidates."

AAP's Ashutosh said today, "It is a clash of ideas, not personalities."

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