ASSEMBLY SENDS DISQUALIFICATION NOTICE TO LAMBA

NEW DELHI: A petition to disqualify former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Alka Lamba as the MLA of the Chandni Chowk constituency was filed by party leader Saurabh Bhardwaj in the Delhi Assembly on Wednesday. Lamba had officially resigned from the membership of the AAP and joined the Congress on September 6.

Following Bhardwaj’s petition, the Delhi Assembly on Wednesday evening sent a notice to Lamba seeking her comments by 3pm on September 18. According to the notice issued by Assembly secretary C Velmurugan, Speaker Ram Niwas Goel has also directed a personal hearing in the matter which will be held at 4pm on September 18 in his chamber.

Lamba said she is yet to receive the notice and that she had only seen it on Twitter until Wednesday night. “For 9 months I was seeking an appointment with Arvind Kejriwal, but wasn’t granted one. Then I wanted to resign and so sought to meet Kejriwal to which the party had asked me to do it on Twitter. So I resigned from AAP on Twitter. It is to be seen if the Speaker now follows all the rules in my disqualification case,” she said.

Lamba will be the fifth AAP leader facing disqualification from the Delhi Assembly. Former AAP MLAS Kapil Mishra, Sandeep Kumar, Anil Bajpai and Devendra Sehrawat have been disqualified under the anti-defection law.

While joining the Congress last week, Lamba had said, “I may have been far from Congress but I have stood by its ideology for the past 25 years. Today is my ‘Ghar-wapsi’.”

Lamba was with the Congress party before joining the AAP six years ago.