Newsmaker | Lone AAP LS MP joins BJP, months after protest against it ’in chains’: Who is Sushil Rinku?

On April 5, 2023, the 48-year-old moved from the Congress to the AAP ahead of the Jalandhar Lok Sabha bypoll. It came within hours of the grand old party expelling him over alleged anti-party activities. The bypoll had been necessitated by the death of Congress MP Santokh Singh Chaudhary in January of that year during Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra. On May 13, Rinku defeated the Congress’s Karamjit Kaur, the wife of the deceased MP, by 58,691 votes.

Rinku joined the BJP on Wednesday, even though the AAP had already declared him its nominee, along with Jalandhar West MLA Sheetal Angural. In the 2022 Assembly polls, Anugral defeated Rinku who contested on a Congress ticket.

Political journey

Rinku is from a family that has been active in the Congress for more than four decades. His father and uncle were both involved with the party’s local unit. His father, the late Ram Lal, was elected Jalandhar councillor in 1997 and 2002, and his wife Sunita too was elected councillor in 2007.

Rinku got involved in politics during his student days. By 1990, he was an active member of the Congress’s student wing NSUI. A graduate of DAV College Jalandhar, he was elected president of its Shri Guru Ravidass Cultural Society in 1994.

By then, he was already a booth-level worker of the Congress, having joined the party in the run-up to the 1992 Assembly elections. In 2006, he won his first electoral contest, becoming a councillor in the Jalandhar Municipal Corporation. He contested Assembly elections for the first time in 2017 from the Jalandhar West (SC-reserved) Assembly seat, when he defeated the BJP’s Mahinder Pal Bhagat, who is the son of three-time MLA and former minister Bhagat Chuni Lal.

His only electoral defeat came in 2022 when he lost to Angural by 4,254 votes. At the time of the Jalandhar Lok Sabha bypoll, he wanted the ticket for his brother, but it went to Rinku. His victory dealt a massive blow to the Congress, which held the seat since 1999.

Despite a low polling percentage (54.7%), Rinku received 34.05% of the total vote share, boosting the AAP’s returns from the 2.5% vote share in 2019. The Congress’s vote share plummeted from 37.9% to 27.44%, while the BJP finished fourth behind the Shiromani Akali Dal.

What worked for the AAP was the tailwind from the party’s sweep in the Assembly polls the year before. Appealing to voters, national convener Arvind Kejriwal and Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann said the party should be given 11 more months before the next Lok Sabha elections in 2024 to fulfil all its promises.