Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha has accused the Aam Aadmi Party government in Punjab of political revenge after his name was classified as “permanently shifted” in the state’s draft electoral rolls.
The draft list was published on 13 August as part of the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision. Chadha appears on the ASDD list - covering voters marked absent, shifted, deceased or duplicate. He is among about 20.66 lakh names, or roughly 9.7 per cent of Punjab’s pre-revision electorate, removed at the draft stage.
Chadha was elected to the Upper House from Punjab as an AAP nominee in 2022. In April 2026 he left the party with six other Rajya Sabha MPs and joined the BJP, calling AAP a party that had drifted from its founding principles.
In a post on X on Thursday, he said he is a sitting MP from Punjab with his voter ID registered in Mohali. He voted at a booth in SAS Nagar during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. “This does not seem like a mere clerical mistake. This is a clear case of political vendetta,” he wrote.
He argued that booth-level officers, electoral registration officers and district election officers are state government staff whose postings the AAP government controls. He also cited Election Commission guidelines that, he said, require sitting public representatives to be placed on a protected list and included in the draft roll if their names are flagged. That instruction, he claimed, was “wilfully violated.”
The rolls are not final. Claims and objections can be filed until 12 September. Punjab’s final SIR list is due on 12 October. Chadha said he is already using the prescribed remedies.
AAP and a senior Punjab official rejected the charge. They said the SIR is an Election Commission exercise and the state government has no role in adding or deleting names. A party spokesperson said Chadha lives in Delhi and that keeping or shifting his registration was his responsibility. AAP further claimed it had information that he was trying to get enrolled in Rajinder Nagar, Delhi, through a “backdated process,” and demanded an inquiry if that were true. Chadha denied any attempt to move his vote to Delhi.
A search of the Commission’s voter portal this week returned no result for his details in either Punjab or Delhi. The row does not, by itself, affect his tenure as a Rajya Sabha member from Punjab. It does add another public clash to the bitter split that began when he and other AAP MPs crossed over to the BJP earlier this year.
