Pawan Khera to make Rajya Sabha debut after Assam FIR row; Congress releases list of candidates

Congress leader Pawan Khera is set to make his Rajya Sabha debut after the Congress named him among its candidates from Karnataka for the upcoming Upper House elections. The party has also nominated Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Mansoor Ali Khan from the state.

Karnataka Chief Minister DK Shivakumar confirmed that Kharge will file his nomination papers on Friday in the presence of senior party leaders.

"Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge is filing the nomination tomorrow at 12.30 pm. Rahul Gandhi is also coming here tomorrow. He'll file the nomination. Then the rest of the candidates, the MLCs, will also file the nomination," Shivakumar told reporters.

Besides Khera, Kharge and Mansoor Ali Khan, the Congress has nominated Meenakshi Natarajan from Madhya Pradesh, Neeraj Dangi from Rajasthan, Praveen Chakravarty from Tamil Nadu and Pranav Jha from Jharkhand for the Rajya Sabha elections and bypolls.

Polling for 24 Rajya Sabha seats across 10 states, including Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, is scheduled for June 18. Bypolls for one seat each in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Odisha will also be held on the same day. The last date for filing nominations is June 8.

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Khera's nomination comes against the backdrop of a recent legal battle involving Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma and his family. The controversy erupted after Khera alleged that Sarma's wife, Riniki Bhuyan Sharma, possessed multiple passports and held undisclosed foreign assets. He also shared documents that he claimed were linked to foreign entities, though Sharma later alleged that the documents were forged.

Both Riniki Bhuyan Sharma and the Assam chief minister dismissed the allegations as baseless and politically motivated.

Following a complaint filed by Sharma in Guwahati on April 5, the Guwahati Crime Branch registered a case against Khera under multiple provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, including charges related to forgery, cheating, defamation and the use of forged documents.

The dispute soon escalated into a wider political confrontation. Assam Police visited Khera's residence in New Delhi on April 7 in connection with the case, although he was not present at the time.

Khera subsequently moved the Supreme Court seeking protection from arrest. On May 1, a bench of Justices JK Maheshwari and AS Chandurkar granted him anticipatory bail, observing that the allegations and counter-allegations in the matter appeared, prima facie, to be driven by political rivalry.