AAP’s five picks for Rajya Sabha include Harbhajan, Raghav Chadha, LPU founder Ashok Mittal

The terms of five Rajya Sabha members from Punjab —Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa (SAD), Partap Singh Bajwa (Congress), Shwait Malik (BJP), Naresh Gujral (SAD) and Shamsher Singh Dullo (Congress) — will end on April 9.

Chadha, who is the AAP’s MLA from Rajinder Nagar in Delhi, will be the youngest sitting Rajya Sabha member at 33. “I thank Arvind Kejriwalji and Bhagwant Mannji for placing such a big responsibility on these young shoulders. I will try my best to raise issues of Punjab and the country in the biggest panchayat of the country. I filed the Rajya Sabha nomination with blessings from my mother,” Chadha tweeted.

Chadha’s rise through the AAP ranks has been quick. Before 2019, he was involved in the party’s legal matters. In 2019, he contested the Lok Sabha elections from South Delhi, but lost. The next year, he won from Rajinder Nagar in the Assembly polls and was given the responsibility of managing the Delhi Jal Board. He was also appointed chairperson of the Delhi Assembly’s peace and harmony committee, set up after the riots in 2020. Over the past several months, he was actively involved in the Punjab Assembly poll campaign.

Pathak, an associate professor at IIT-Delhi, has been with AAP for several years now. He got his Ph.D from the University of Cambridge in 2011, and returned a few years later to teach at IIT-Delhi. According to party insiders, he has been working on the Punjab poll strategy for over a year now.

“He has been working behind the scenes for many years and built the entire organisation cadre in Punjab. He was the man behind conducting accurate and scientific surveys in the state, selection of candidates, and deciding the entire strategy for the party’s resounding victory in Punjab,” AAP said in a statement on Monday.

Harbhajan Singh’s name has been doing the rounds in party circles for the last few weeks. Party insiders said his association with the sport, image as a youth icon and enthusiasm to work for the state were the deciding factors in finalising his name.

The remaining two names — industrialist Sanjeev Arora and Lovely Professional University Chancellor Ashok Mittal — came as a surprise to many.

Arora, 58, is the chairman and MD of Ritesh Properties and Industries Limited, a group of 18 firms with offices across India. Besides manufacture and export of garments, the firm is involved in real estate, housing, industrial and commercial sectors and has developed the Hampton Business Park and Hampton Homes on Ludhiana’s Chandigarh Road. Arora is also the chairperson of the Krishna Pran Breast Cancer Charitable Trust, which he founded in 2005 after his mother died of breast cancer. The trust provides free treatment to needy cancer patients.

Mittal, along with his brothers Naresh Mittal and Ramesh Mittal, has expanded the family business set up by his late father, Baldev Raj Mittal, who started with a small shop in Jalandhar Cantonment in 1964. The Mittal family set up the Lovely Professional University (LPU) — the first private university in the state — in 2005.