Arvind Kejriwal has escalated the Delhi excise policy battle into a wider confrontation over judicial neutrality, telling the Delhi High Court that Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma should step aside because her orders in connected matters, the pace of proceedings and her attendance at programmes organised by the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad had created what he called a reasonable apprehension that he would not receive a fair hearing. The judge, after hearing him argue in person for several hours on April 13, reserved her order on the recusal applications filed by Kejriwal and other accused.
The hearing marks a sharp turn in a case that had seemed to swing in Kejriwal’s favour on February 27, when a trial court discharged him and 22 others in the Central Bureau of Investigation case, saying there was no overarching conspiracy or criminal intent established in the framing of the now-scrapped excise policy. The CBI quickly signalled an appeal, and on March 9 Justice Sharma’s bench took up that challenge, issued notice to the discharged accused and stayed the trial court’s adverse observations against the investigating officer while indicating prima facie disagreement with parts of the lower court’s reasoning.
Kejriwal’s argument in court was that the problem was not the personal integrity of the judge but the appearance of fairness in a politically charged prosecution. He said his doubts deepened after the High Court’s March 9 intervention, which came on the first day of hearing on the CBI revision plea. He also pointed to earlier rulings by Justice Sharma in related excise matters, including orders involving bail and the legality of his arrest, and argued that the court had repeatedly accepted the reasoning advanced by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate with unusual speed and force. His side stressed that a litigant’s reasonable apprehension, rather than proof of actual bias, can be sufficient ground for recusal.
The most politically sensitive part of Kejriwal’s submission concerned Justice Sharma’s presence at events organised by the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad, a lawyers’ body widely viewed as aligned with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Kejriwal told the court that she had attended four such functions and said that because he and the Aam Aadmi Party openly opposed that ideology, the appearances had reinforced his fear that the bench might be more receptive to the other side. That charge pushed the courtroom dispute beyond conventional procedural objections and into the terrain of ideology, public perception and the boundary between a judge’s public engagements and a litigant’s confidence in the bench.
The CBI rejected the plea in emphatic terms. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta described the recusal push as motivated and warned that accepting it would set a damaging precedent, arguing that judges cannot be accused of bias merely because litigants dislike their orders or because they attend professional events. The agency also said that legal seminars attended by judges cannot automatically be treated as evidence of ideological proximity, and noted that other sitting judges have appeared at similar programmes. Justice Sharma herself remarked during the proceedings that it was the first time in her judicial career that someone had asked her to recuse.
The procedural trail shows that Kejriwal first tried to move the matter away from Justice Sharma on the administrative side. Delhi High Court Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya declined that request on March 15, saying the case had been assigned under the roster and that any question of recusal had to be decided by the judge concerned. That left Kejriwal with the more delicate route of pressing the argument directly before the same bench, a choice that carried legal risk but also allowed him to frame the dispute as one about institutional confidence rather than only his own defence.
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