AAP leader Somnath Bharti outright declared that the alliance — which the party formally exited in 2025 barring issue-based support thereafter — had “no future” so long as the Congress led it. “[Congress] said on one hand that we would fight as an alliance and back each other, but behind the scenes [it] appears to be with the BJP,” Bharti said.

The INDIA bloc meeting at the heart of the attack was held in the national capital, but the fight that keeps the two parties estranged lies further northward in the immediate — in Punjab.

“What kind of alliance is that?” Bharti said, also noting that after drawing a blank in the 2025 Delhi assembly polls, Congress leaders celebrated AAP’s loss to the BJP. “The Congress does not know how to honour the code of alliance,” Bharti asserted.

The Delhi battle Bharti invoked is, however, not the complete story. The one big state where Arvind Kejriwal’s party and the Congress remain locked in a live, direct contest is Punjab.

Even in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls thereafter, while the two parties allied as INDIA bloc partners in Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Chandigarh and Goa, they fought separately in Punjab. Of the 13 Lok Sabha seats of Punjab, the Congress won seven and AAP three (with one going to the Shiromani Akali Dal, two to Independents). That contest sharpened in the assembly bypolls that followed. No pact could later be reached in the Haryana assembly polls of 2024 too, with both blaming the other for breakdown of talks.

The most recent verdict reinforced the pattern in Punjab. In the municipal polls last month, the ruling AAP won nearly half of the 1,977 wards, with the Congress a distant second below 400. This came as succour as the AAP had suffered a setback within its ranks after six of its seven Rajya Sabha MPs from Punjab — led by Raghav Chadha — switched to the BJP a couple of months ago.

Both the AAP and Congress are now preparing for the 2027 assembly elections, and for Kejriwal’s party, Punjab is its last major bastion. Punjab Congress leaders have long argued that an alliance with AAP would only revive the Akali Dal or the BJP, and erode the party’s own base.

On Monday, Congress leaders said absentees at the alliance meeting had effectively “merged” with the BJP and called them weak. The Congress was projected at the meeting as the “glue” of the 23-party bloc.

Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann, however, has repeatedly jibed that in Punjab and Delhi, “mothers could tell their children the shortest story: Once there used to be Congress”.

In sync by the precarious formula of the INDIA bloc — together at national level, not necessarily at the state level — the AAP last year joined a united opposition’s campaign against the revision of electoral rolls. But it did not return to the bloc as such.

Punjab is among the states now seeing a Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls, for polls at the start of 2027. That’s in about eight months or so.

Another party in a somewhat similar situation was the Trinamool Congress, with a complicated relationship with ‘INDIA’ in the three years of the bloc’s formation. TMC leader Mamata Banerjee did, however, attend the bloc’s meeting as she is facing a massive rebellion within the party she founded in 1998, having lost power in Bengal to the BJP. Kejriwal had called on her as she arrived in Delhi on the eve of the meeting. But they had their own reasons to attend the meeting or not.