By Ananya Sharma 
Hyderabad, April 8: By Wednesday afternoon, Pawan Khera was in a Hyderabad courtroom filing for anticipatory bail. Assam Police, according to multiple reports, were already somewhere in the city looking for him. Three days ago, he was holding a press conference in Delhi. That is how fast this thing has moved.
What started as a pre-election political broadside has become, in the span of 72 hours, a multi-state legal chase involving a senior Congress leader, an Assam Police unit operating deep inside Telangana, two High Courts, and an FIR carrying sections that, if proven, could mean life imprisonment. All of this, with Assam voting tomorrow.
The Press Conference That Lit the Fuse
Sunday, April 5. Khera, head of the Congress party’s media department, took the mic at a Delhi press conference and made a series of sweeping allegations against Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, wife of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. Gaurav Gogoi, Assam Congress chief, held a simultaneous presser in Guwahati.
The claim at the centre of it all: that Riniki holds not one but three foreign passports from the UAE, Antigua and Barbuda, and Egypt. Khera displayed what he said were images of the documents. He went further, alleging she owns two properties in Dubai that were never declared in the CM’s election affidavit, and has links to a company registered in Wyoming, USA, one he valued at Rs 52,000 crore, which he tied to hotel ventures involving Sarma, his wife, and their son. He called for a Special Investigation Team probe by the Union Home Ministry and urged the Election Commission to cancel Sarma’s nomination outright.
It was a lot. Whether it was too much or too little, depending on who you ask, is precisely what courts and investigators will eventually have to figure out.
Sarma Didn’t Wait
Most politicians in Sarma’s position would have issued a denial and let their lawyers do the talking. Sarma did not do that. Within hours, he was at his own press conference with a slide deck titled, reportedly, “How the Truth Was Uncovered.”
His core counter-claim: every document Khera displayed was fabricated. Not just incorrect. Fabricated. Using AI. And sourced, Sarma alleged, from a Pakistani social media group called “Pakistanis in Ajman”, where his wife’s photo was morphed onto a lost passport belonging to someone else entirely.
He went through the documents one by one. On the UAE passport the UAE does not issue passports to non-citizens, full stop. What the country offers is a Golden Visa, a long-term residency programme. Getting that confused with a passport, Sarma suggested, was either a sign of deliberate fraud or profound ignorance of how Gulf immigration works. He also pointed to a numerical anomaly the passport’s ID number encoded a birth year of 1996, while his wife was born in 1973.
On the Antigua and Barbuda document, he flagged a mismatch in the passport type code “PA” in the text versus “PPA” in the Machine Readable Zone and said the facial features did not match his wife’s. On the Egyptian passport, he claimed the English text had been altered but the Arabic remained unchanged, exposing the edit. A simple reverse Google search of the passport number, he said, would bring up the original owner an Egyptian citizen who had lost her passport and uploaded it online.
As for the Rs 52,000 crore company: “The entire budget of Assam isn’t even Rs 52,000 crore,” Sarma said. “Even if a chief minister earns for 20 years, it couldn’t be Rs 52,000 crore. That’s basic common sense.”
That line, whatever else you think of his press conference, landed.
The Pakistan Angle
This is where the political temperature went from hot to something else entirely.
Sarma alleged that in the ten days leading up to the Congress presser, Pakistani news channels had aired at least 11 talk shows about the Assam elections, “which never happened earlier,” and that in every one of them, the conclusion being pushed was that Congress should win. He called this “deeply suspicious” and framed it as part of a coordinated effort to use foreign-linked content to influence the Assam vote.
Whether that holds up as a serious allegation or functions mainly as election-eve rhetoric will depend on what investigators eventually find. But here’s the political reality: by the time Assam Police were photographed outside Khera’s Delhi residence on April 7, the dominant news story was no longer “CM’s wife has three passports.” It was “Congress used fake documents sourced from Pakistan.” That is a fundamentally different headline. In the last 48 hours before polling in a state where national security and anti-Pakistan sentiment run deep, that shift matters.
Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, for her part, posted a pointed rebuttal on X. “Neither I, nor my children, nor my husband have any business interests or assets in Dubai or anywhere outside India,” she wrote. “Today’s claims are laughable.” She then turned the lens on Gogoi, asking him to disclose whether his own family had any foreign financial links.
The Raid, the Flight, and the Court Filing
On the morning of April 7, Assam Police arrived at Khera’s New Delhi residence. He was not home. Sarma, with some relish, told reporters that Khera had “run away” to Hyderabad.
Khera’s legal team told a different story. They argued that the FIR copy had not been uploaded to the police website as required under Supreme Court guidelines, a procedural lapse that, in their view, rendered the search legally questionable. They also contended that the raid was conducted not as a genuine investigative step but as a prelude to arrest.
By Wednesday, Khera had filed anticipatory bail petition CRLP 5285/2026 before the Telangana High Court, citing his Hyderabad residence as the jurisdictional basis. The matter is listed before Justice K Sujana on April 9, the same day Assam votes.
What the FIR Actually Says
The FIR, filed by Riniki Bhuyan Sarma at the Guwahati Crime Branch, invokes a substantial list of sections under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita: Section 175 (false statement in connection with an election), Sections 35 and 36, Section 318 (cheating), Section 337 (forgery of a court record or public register), Section 338 (forgery of a valuable security or will), Section 340 (using a forged document as genuine), Section 352 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace), and Section 356 (defamation).
The Section 175 inclusion is deliberate. It frames the press conference not merely as defamation but as an attempt to interfere with an election which, under the law, carries significantly heavier consequences. Sarma has said publicly that presenting fabricated documents to influence election outcomes could attract life imprisonment. His legal team, presumably, believes they have enough to make that argument stick.
This Has Happened Before
It is worth stepping back for a moment, because this confrontation between Sarma’s government and Pawan Khera is not new.
In February 2023, Khera was deplaned from an IndiGo flight at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport by Assam Police and briefly taken into custody over remarks he made about Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a press conference. Three FIRs had been filed in three separate states, Assam, Varanasi, and Lucknow, over the same set of words. Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for Khera at an emergency Supreme Court hearing, argued that the multi-state FIR strategy was designed to harass. The Supreme Court agreed to grant interim bail within hours.
That 2023 episode, and the speed with which the Supreme Court stepped in, is almost certainly why Khera’s team moved quickly to the High Court this time rather than waiting to see if an arrest followed.
For Congress, being targeted by Assam Police on the eve of an election is becoming something of a recurring pattern. For Sarma, it has twice now been the instrument he reaches for. Whether that reflects a legitimate use of law enforcement or the weaponisation of state machinery against political opponents is, depending on your reading, either an open question or a settled one.
What Happens Now
The hearing before Justice K Sujana on April 9 will be the next critical moment. Khera’s team will likely press the procedural argument the FIR upload lapse alongside a broader contention that the timing of the police action, a day before an election, speaks to its true intent. The state will argue that the documents Khera presented were demonstrably forged, that the election-interference angle elevates the severity of the offence, and that anticipatory bail should not be an automatic shield when the allegations involve deliberate fraud.
The court will have to navigate all of that. Courts usually do, eventually. The more immediate question is simpler: will Assam Police attempt to detain Khera before the hearing tomorrow morning, or will they hold off?
As it turns out, this entire episode will likely be remembered not for its legal resolution, which is months away, but for the way it reshaped the final news cycle before Assam voted. Congress came into Sunday with a story about hidden foreign assets. By Tuesday night, the story was about Pakistan, fabricated documents, and a Congress leader in hiding. Whether the passport documents were real or forged, that narrative shift is what Assam’s 2.5 crore voters will carry into the booth with them.
The courts will settle the legal questions. The ballot box will deliver the political verdict first.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
