The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Maharashtra suffered a post-poll setback when two senior leaders - state convenor Anjali Damania and state secretary Preeti Sharma-Menon - quit the party Thursday.
"Dear colleagues, with a heavy heart, I am ending my association with AAP," Damania said in her resignation message to the party leadership.
"My greatest regards for Arvind (Kejriwal), who is like an elder brother. All I want to request is that please do not have any conspiracy theories over my exit," she said.
Damania added she had never compromised her values and would never do so.
"I request the media to respect my privacy," she said. Attempts to contact her remained unsuccessful as her phone remained switched off.
A crusader against corruption in high places, Damania said she had nothing more to add except that she cared a lot for AAP and expressed her best wishes for it.
Sharma-Menon also sent in her resignation.
Senior AAP leader Mayank Gandhi's office in Mumbai confirmed the developments but declined to comment on them.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the AAP put up candidates in all the 48 Lok Sabha seats in the state, but the party was wiped out.
Many of its prominent and high-profile candidates like Damania, who contested against Bharatiya Janata Party's former president Nitin Gadkari in Nagpur, Gandhi, Medha Patkar and Vijay Pandhare, among others, lost.
Both Damania and Sharma-Menon are believed to be upset over certain organisation issues and internal party mechanisms which prevented them from concentrating adequately on important social and electoral issues, said a party office-bearer here.
Both Damania and Sharma-Menon are likely to meet top AAP functioneries in Mumbai later.
After the AAP rout in most parts of India, barring Punjab, many other high-profile activists, including Shazia Ilmi, Captain Gopinath and others, quit in the past few weeks.
