Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera's last line of legal defence collapsed in the Supreme Court on Friday when a bench of Justice JK Maheshwari and Justice Atul S Chandurkar declined to either vacate the stay on his Telangana High Court transit anticipatory bail or grant him even a short extension to Monday. The ruling leaves Khera legally exposed, with Assam Police, already at his doorstep once, now free to move against him in a forgery and criminal conspiracy case registered at the behest of Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma's wife, Riniki Bhuyan Sharma.
The trouble began when Khera publicly alleged that Riniki Bhuyan Sharma possessed passports from multiple countries, prompting an FIR at Guwahati Crime Branch covering forgery, cheating, and defamation under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. After Assam Police visited his Delhi home and descended on Hyderabad in pursuit on April 7, Khera sought refuge in the Telangana High Court, which on April 10 extended him a week's transit anticipatory bail conditioned on his approaching the Gauhati High Court for further relief. Assam struck back swiftly at the Supreme Court, which on April 15 stayed that order after the Solicitor General revealed that Khera's bail petition had been filed with a mismatched Aadhaar card, the front of his own card paired with the reverse of his wife's.
Before the bench on Friday, Senior Advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi insisted this was nothing more than a rushed filing error that was corrected on the spot before the High Court, arguing it was wholly disproportionate to strip a politician of personal liberty over a paperwork slip while, in his words, "hundreds of Assam police were hunting for Khera."
The bench showed little appetite for the "honest mistake" narrative. When Singhvi pushed for at minimum a weekend extension, pointedly asking "Am I a hardened criminal so as to deny even this relief?", Justice Maheshwari brought the argument back to the document irregularity, and when Singhvi went further, suggesting the Supreme Court's own stay had been obtained by misleading it, that submission landed poorly with the bench.
The Court's sole concession was a formal clarification that neither the High Court's observations nor the Supreme Court's stay order should cast any shadow over the Assam court's independent assessment of any fresh anticipatory bail application Khera chooses to file. With that, the vacation plea was dismissed and Khera was directed to seek relief in Assam.
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