AAP Releases First List for 2027 Elections, 3 MLAs Quit to Join BJP

November

2026

Panjab's ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has released its first list of 40 candidates for the 2027 assembly election. Released on 31 Oct, all the candidates in the list are sitting legislators. Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann will recontest from the Dhuri Assembly constituency, Sangrur district. Prominent among those missing are Panjab Finance Minister Harpal Cheema, Education Minister Harjot Bains, and Panjab AAP chief Aman Arora. Meanwhile, three sitting Members of Legislative Assembly, Harmeet Singh Pathanmajra from Sanaur, Chetan Singh Jouramajra from Sunam, and Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh from Amritsar North, have resigned from AAP’s primary membership and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Pathanmajra’s relations with AAP deteriorated after he criticized Panjab Principal Secretary, Home Affairs and Justice Krishan Kumar during the 2025 floods. The government charged him in alleged rape and illegal mining cases in September 2025. Panjab police then arrested him near Gwalior in March, and he is out on bail. Jouramajra won from Samana in 2022, defeating veteran Shiromani Akali Dal leader Surjit Singh Rakhra, and was made the Health and Family Welfare Minister. In January 2023, after he mistreated the then Vice-Chancellor of Baba Farid University of Health Sciences, Faridkot, Dr. Raj Bahadur, he was moved to different portfolios and eventually dropped from the cabinet in September 2024. Rakhra joined AAP in May 2025, which places Jouramajra’s nomination from Samana in jeopardy. Vijay Partap is a former Indian Police Service officer who resigned in April 2021, shortly after the Punjab and Haryana High Court quashed his Special Investigation Team's report on the 2015 Kotkapura police firing case, related to the sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib (Sikh scripture and charter). He campaigned for AAP in more than 70 seats in 2022, promising to bring the culprits to justice. When AAP did not pursue the sacrilege or shooting cases, he started expressing his views independently of the party line and was suspended for five years over alleged anti-party activities in June 2025. BJP is likely to field all three from the same Assembly constituencies they won in the 2022 Assembly elections. Meanwhile, following a meeting of its principal drafting committee and senior leadership, Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De, WPD) has dissolved its existing organizational structure and will reconstitute it (earlier coverage).