Arvind Kejriwal's ‘Satyagrah’: Former Delhi CM to boycott Excise policy case proceedings before Justice Swarana Kanta

In a rare move, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal said on Monday that he and his lawyers will not participate or argue further in the excise policy case proceedings before Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma.

In a letter to Sharma, former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal highlighted the "serious issue of conflict of interest", saying that both of Sharma's children are "professionally engaged on multiple advocates' panels of the Union government."

Kejriwal said the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is the opposite party in the excise policy case against him.

Earlier, Kejriwal had sought that the excise policy case be transferred from Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma to another judge, saying that if the matter stays with Justice Sharma, the "matter may not receive a hearing marked by impartiality and neutrality".

However, Justice Sharma rejected Kejriwal's application for her recusal in the case. According to Bar and Bench, the judge had said that a politician cannot be allowed to sow seeds of mistrust and that Kejriwal's application seeking her recusal amounted to putting the judiciary on trial.

The conflict of interest

Kejriwal said in his letter to Sharma on 27 April that Tushar Mehta, the Solicitor General, is the advocate on the opposite side, and both children of Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma "are directly assigned cases" by Tushar Mehta.

Kejriwal said, "Tushar Mehta decides how many and which cases should be assigned to Your Ladyship's children. If more cases are assigned to them, they get more fees."

He claimed "the sequence of events" is bound to deepen public apprehension.

Sharma was elevated to the Delhi High Court in March 2022. "A little over five months later, in September 2022, your son was empanelled as the Union's Group A counsel for the Supreme Court," Kejriwal said while detailing the postings of Delhi HC judge Sharma and her children.

"Thereafter, in September 2025, your daughter, Ms. Shambhavi Sharma, was empanelled as the Union's Government Pleader before this Hon'ble High Court, and in the same month, your son was empanelled as Senior Panel Counsel before this High Court as well," Arvind Kejriwal said.

"Just two months later, your daughter was also empanelled as Group C panel counsel for the Supreme Court," he added.

Kejriwal, however, wrote, "Taken together, these are, at the very least, troubling."

'Loss of confidence in...'

The AAP national convenor stated in his letter that the "judgment rejecting recusal has itself become an additional and independent reason for my loss of confidence in the fairness of further proceedings before this Bench."

Kejriwal further questioned: "How do I expect that I would be heard on a wholly clean slate" when his plea of apprehension has been judicially understood as a personal and institutional affront.

"A litigant can perhaps live with an adverse order. What is far more difficult to accept is a judgment whose language conveys that the litigant's plea has been seen as a challenge to the Judge's dignity, oath, and institutional standing," Kejriwal wrote.

He said, "The judgment speaks of 'accusations hurled at me', of a litigant attempting to prove that 'the Judge herself is tainted', and of the need to avoid sending a signal that the Court can be 'intimidated by a political litigant'."

"Those are not, with respect, answers to the case I had brought. They show me that my plea of apprehension has been judicially understood as a personal and institutional affront. And once that has happened, how do I expect that I would be heard on a wholly clean slate?" he said.

'I am prepared to bear those consequences'

In his letter to Justice Sharma, Kejriwal drew on Mahatma Gandhi's concept of Satyagraha and stated that his present inability is limited to this matter and that he is fully conscious that he may prejudice his own legal interests by doing so.

"I am prepared to bear those consequences. That is the burden which every conscientious act of Gandhian satyagraha must bear, and my conscience leaves me no other dignified course," he wrote.

"I cannot make peace with my soul by participating in proceedings marked, in my respectful view, by so grave an appearance of conflict, as though all were well," he said.

"To do so would be a betrayal of my conscience, a disservice to the dignity of the judiciary, and an injustice to the people of India who still believe that courts are the last refuge against the overreach of power," Kejriwal stated in the letter.