Rupnagar, October 17 — A Rupnagar court on Thursday sent Navneet Chaturvedi, accused of forging the signatures of 10 Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs to file nomination papers for a Rajya Sabha bypoll, to seven days of police remand.
Chaturvedi, a resident of Jaipur in Rajasthan who identifies himself as the national president of the Janata Party, was arrested by Punjab Police on Wednesday and produced before the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate amid heavy security.
Police said Chaturvedi had filed two separate nominations for the Rajya Sabha seat — one on October 6 and another on October 13 — both allegedly bearing forged signatures of AAP legislators as proposers. “The papers were found to contain fake signatures, and both nominations were subsequently rejected,” a police officer said.
The case was registered on Monday after AAP MLAs complained that their signatures had been fraudulently used on the documents. Following the complaint, police launched an investigation and traced Chaturvedi to Rajasthan before taking him into custody.
The bypoll was necessitated after AAP MP Sanjeev Arora resigned from the Rajya Sabha upon being elected to the Punjab Assembly earlier this year. Arora, who was originally slated to serve until April 9, 2028, is now a minister in Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann’s cabinet.
Meanwhile, AAP’s official nominee, industrialist Rajinder Gupta, was declared elected unopposed to the Upper House on Thursday. Police officials said they are now probing the extent of Chaturvedi’s involvement and whether others aided him in the forgery. “We are investigating the source of the forged documents and any potential accomplices,” an investigating officer noted.
