Arvind Kejriwal and the hornet's nest he has stirred

By publicly announcing that he would boycott the court of Justice Swarna Kanta Sharma in Delhi High Court, former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has stirred a hornet’s nest. While many have applauded his move, opinion is divided within the legal fraternity.

Besides alleging judicial bias, Kejriwal said he would not participate in the present case involving the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)’s appeal against a Delhi court discharging him and others in the Delhi excise case. He also said he would not appear in any case related to the BJP or RSS, or those in which solicitor-general Tushar Mehta appears. Calling it a “satyagraha”, he said he was ready to face the consequences.

“The principle that justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done, is among the most sacred assurances that a court gives to a citizen in a democracy. Respectfully, that assurance cannot be dishonoured by asking the citizen to ignore what anyone can plainly see in a case like this,” he wrote.

Raising what he described as a “far more serious issue of conflict of interest”, Kejriwal alleged that both of Justice Sharma's children are on multiple advocates’ panels of the Union government and are directly assigned cases by Mehta, who determines the allocation of such matters.

“The RTI material that I had verified and placed before Your Ladyship showed that your son was marked an extraordinarily high number of dockets — 5,904 between 2023 and 2025. That places him among the top ten counsels receiving the highest number of such allocations out of a pool of roughly 700 combined panel counsels for Supreme Court,” the letter said.

Each docket, he noted, carries an appearance fee of Rs 9,000 per day. “This is a substantial amount of money running into crores of rupees,” he wrote. AAP members claimed that if the judge’s son appeared even twice a year on each of these dockets, the annual fees could run into around Rs 10 crore.

Justice Sharma was elevated to the Delhi High Court in March 2022, the letter noted. “A little over five months later, in September 2022, your son was empanelled as the Union’s Group A counsel for the Supreme Court. 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. Just two months later, your daughter was also empanelled as Group C panel counsel for the Supreme Court,” Kejriwal wrote, describing the sequence as “troubling”.

“…how can an ordinary citizen believe that this Hon’ble Bench can rule against the Solicitor General, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or the Union government, especially in a politically sensitive case like this one?” the letter added.