Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann on Tuesday met President Droupadi Murmu and urged her to cancel the Rajya Sabha membership of six MPs from the state, who were elected on the AAP ticket and shifted to the BJP, saying their act was a “mockery” and “murder” of the Constitution.Mann told the President that the manner in which the MPs broke away and aligned with another party struck at the core of anti-defection safeguards and turned the mandate of voters into a negotiable instrument.Before Mann, the defected MPs also met the President and alleged misuse of Punjab Government machinery to target them after they moved to the BJP.After meeting the President at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mann said the MPs could not simply declare themselves a separate group and proceed to merge with another party. He said there was no provision in law that permitted such a route, and described the move as a direct violation of constitutional principles governing defections.“The mandate belongs to the people and cannot be altered midway through internal manoeuvres,” said Mann, while speaking to reporters. He maintained that if the MPs had serious differences with AAP, the proper course was to resign and return to the electorate. Retaining their seats while changing political allegiance, he said, undermined both Parliament and the voters who elected them.Mann also raised the absence of a recall mechanism, suggesting that Parliament needed to consider amendments to ensure accountability in such cases.The controversy follows a major setback for AAP on April 24, when seven of its 10 Rajya Sabha MPs — Raghav Chadha, Ashok Mittal, Sandeep Pathak, Harbhajan Singh, Rajendra Gupta, Vikramjit Sahney and Swati Maliwal — resigned from the party and merged with the BJP, citing a departure from AAP’s original principles and values. Six of the seven MPs were from Punjab.Within hours of Mann’s intervention, the defecting MPs responded with allegations of political retaliation. Raghav Chadha, after a separate meeting with the President, said the Punjab Government had begun targeting them through state agencies.He said the MPs conveyed how the AAP-led Punjab Government was allegedly misusing the state machinery to target them for exercising their constitutional rights after a two-thirds of the party MPs chose to merge with the BJP.“The party that once cried vendetta is now practising its most toxic form. We take strength from the President’s assurance that constitutional rights and democratic choices must be respected. AAP today behaves less like a political party and more like an obsessed, jilted ex — bitter, vindictive and unable to move on,” Chadha said.Sandeep Pathak said the FIRs registered against him were fabricated and intended to create pressure. He said the decision to exit AAP was taken within the framework of the Constitution and would be defended through legal channels. He said intimidation would not deter them from continuing their political work.