On Monday, Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann escorted the party’s candidates including Harbhajan Singh and Raghav Chadha to the Vidhan Sabha headquarters to register their nominations. After winning 92 seats in the Punjab Assembly elections, the AAP was given the opportunity to propose five members to the Upper House.
Former cricketer Harbhajan Singh, IIT-Delhi associate professor Sandeep Pathak, senior party leader and Delhi MLA Raghav Chadha, Lovely Professional University Chancellor Ashok Mittal, and Ludhiana-based industrialist Sanjeev Arora have all been nominated by the AAM Aadmi Party (AAP) for the Rajya Sabha elections on March 31.
On Monday, all five party nominees in Chandigarh filed their nomination papers. All five are expected to be elected to the Rajya Sabha after the AAP won 92 of the 117 seats in the Assembly elections.
Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa (SAD), Partap Singh Bajwa (Congress), Shwait Malik (BJP), Naresh Gujral (SAD), and Shamsher Singh Dullo (Congress) are the five Rajya Sabha members from Punjab whose mandates will expire on April 9.
Raghav Chadha, an AAP MLA from Rajinder Nagar in Delhi, would be the youngest member of the Rajya Sabha at 33 years old. “I applaud Arvind Kejriwalji and Bhagwant Mannji for entrusting these young people with such a large responsibility. I shall do my best to bring up issues concerning Punjab and the country in the country’s largest panchayat. Chadha tweeted, “I filed the Rajya Sabha nomination with my mother’s blessings.”
Raghav Chadha has quickly risen through the ranks of the AAP. Prior to 2019, he was active in the legal affairs of the party. He ran for the Lok Sabha elections from South Delhi in 2019, but lost. The next year, he was elected to the Assembly from Rajinder Nagar and assigned the job of administering the Delhi Jal Board. He was also named head of the Delhi Assembly’s peace and harmony committee, which was formed in the aftermath of the 2020 riots. He has been heavily involved in the Punjab Assembly election campaign for several months.
Pathak, an associate professor at IIT-Delhi, has been a member of AAP for a long time. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2011 and returned to teach at IIT-Delhi a few years later. He has been working on the Punjab poll plan for almost a year, according to party sources.
“For many years, he has worked quietly behind the scenes in Punjab, building the entire organization’s cadre.” He was responsible for conducting precise and scientific surveys in the state, selecting candidates, and defining the whole strategy for the AAP’s stunning victory in Punjab, according to a statement released by the party on Monday.
Harbhajan Singh’s name has been circulating around political circles for a few weeks. His involvement with the sport, image as a young star, and desire to work for the state, according to party sources, were the determining reasons in naming him.
Many people were surprised by the final two names: businessman Sanjeev Arora and Lovely Professional University Chancellor Ashok Mittal.
Ritesh Properties and Industries Limited, a conglomerate of 18 companies with offices across India, is led by Arora, who is 58 years old. In addition to garment manufacturing and export, the company is active in the real estate, housing, industrial, and commercial sectors, having constructed the Hampton Business Park and Hampton Homes on Chandigarh Road in Ludhiana. Arora also serves as chair of the Krishna Pran Breast Cancer Charitable Trust, which he established in 2005 after his mother died of breast cancer. The trust gives free treatment to cancer patients who are in need.
Mittal, together with his brothers Naresh Mittal and Ramesh Mittal, has grown the Mittal family company, which began in 1964 with a tiny shop in Jalandhar Cantonment. In 2005, the Mittal family founded Lovely Professional University (LPU), the state’s first private university.
