The Telangana High Court on Friday granted one-week anticipatory bail (transit protection) to Congress leader and AICC media and publicity department chairperson Pawan Khera in connection with an FIR registered against him by Riniki Bhuyan Sharma, wife of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. Justice K Sujana directed that no coercive action be taken against Khera for seven days, allowing him time to approach the appropriate court in Assam for regular anticipatory bail.
The case stems from an FIR lodged at Guwahati Crime Branch Police Station under multiple provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), including Section 175 (false statement in connection with an election), Sections 35 and 36 (general conspiracy), 318 (cheating), 338 and 337 (forgery of valuable security and public records), 340 (using forged document as genuine), 352 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace), and 356 (defamation).
The complaint was filed after the Congress leader presented several forged documents to claim that Riniki Bhuyan Sharma has passports of three countries and properties in Dubai and USA. Assam BJP has produced the original documents, which were used to produce the fake documents. Congress also registered two companies in the name of the CM’s family in the USA, one the day before the press conference and the other the day the press conference was held to make the allegations.
During the hearing, Assam Advocate General Devajit Saikia opposed the petition, arguing it was not maintainable in Telangana as Khera is a Delhi resident and had failed to demonstrate why he could not approach a court in Assam. He described Khera as a “flight risk,” noting that police had visited him in Hyderabad and that he had allegedly fled rather than return to Delhi. Senior Advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for Khera, contended that the case was politically motivated and amounted to vendetta.
The court’s order provides interim relief with certain conditions and requires Khera to file a regular anticipatory bail application before the jurisdictional court in Assam within the one-week window.
Brief Background: Congress Allegations and the Forged Documents
The FIR follows a press conference addressed by Pawan Khera in New Delhi on 5 April 2026, during the height of the Assam Assembly election campaign. Khera had dramatically claimed that Riniki Bhuyan Sharma held three foreign passports, from the UAE, Egypt, and Antigua and Barbuda, and that the family had parked ₹52,000 crore in undisclosed assets, including through shell companies registered in Wyoming, USA. He displayed purported passport images and company filings as evidence, accusing the Chief Minister’s family of violating India’s single-citizenship norms and concealing foreign wealth.
Subsequent scrutiny by CM Himanta Biswa Sarma, independent fact-checkers, and OpIndia revealed that every document was crudely forged. The UAE “Golden Card” was not a passport at all, but a digitally altered Emirates ID card lifted from a Pakistani national’s lost wallet, which was posted in a Facebook group called “Pakistani in Ajman”. The same 15-digit ID number (784-1996-5557498-8) appears on both, which is impossible under UAE’s unique biometric numbering system. The forger changed the name, date of birth, and nationality, but left internal contradictions intact.
The Antigua & Barbuda and Egyptian “Passports” carried the misspelt surname “Sarma” instead of Sharma used by the CM’s wife, used publicly available photographs, and contained anomalies in the Machine-Readable Zone. The documents failed basic forensic consistency tests required by ICAO standards.
The two LLCs cited by Congress were registered online on the Wyoming Secretary of State portal on 3 April and the day after. Anyone can form such an entity for just $199 with no verification of identity or assets. To expose the ease of fabrication, the Assam BJP unit immediately registered a demonstrably fake company, GauravElizabeth786 LLC, on the same portal. Transferring ₹52,000 crore into a one-day-old US shell company during an election campaign was logistically and regulatorily impossible.
The Wyoming company @Pawankhera mentioned in his live is completely different from the one he cited in his press conference. Interestingly, this new entity was created after his first PC and even uses a bizarre email ID: [email protected].
— Ron Bikash Gaurav (@RonBikashGaurav) April 8, 2026
What’s more shocking? Both… pic.twitter.com/xkPFkFlGMd
It was also found that the documents showing that the CM’s family owns two properties in Dubai are clumsy photoshops of documents belonging to different people. The original documents are uploaded to the document-hosting site Scribd.
CM Sarma and his wife have described the entire episode as a “poorly executed digital manipulation” aimed at influencing voters. Riniki Bhuyan Sharma has filed the FIR, and both have announced criminal and civil defamation suits. The revelations have turned the Congress campaign into an embarrassment, with the party yet to offer any rebuttal to the forensic evidence of forgery.
The one-week relief from the Telangana High Court is procedural and does not amount to a ruling on the merits of the case. Khera must now seek regular protection in Assam, where the investigation into the alleged forgery and defamation continues.
