#StoryAlert🚨 The CBI's challenge to Arvind Kejriwal and 22 others'...

#StoryAlert🚨

The CBI's challenge to Arvind Kejriwal and 22 others' discharge in the alleged liquor scam has opened up deeper and troubling questions about the High Court judge hearing the case, Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma.

I analysed orders in all the 165 cases (criminal revision petitions) filed since January 1 to March 17 this year in the Delhi High Court. Under the new roster effective January 5, six judges were assigned criminal revision petitions, including Justice Sharma, who also now exclusively holds the roster of criminal cases relating to sitting/former MPs/MLAs.

Of the 165, Justice Sharma’s board included at least 17 such Criminal Revision Petitions (like CBI-Kejriwal case) during this period. The pattern that emerges in these cases is striking. A longish🧵. Stay with me.

Link to the article—frontline.thehindu.com/incoming/delhi…

In almost all these cases, Justice Sharma issued notice, called for a reply, status report, or trial court record, and then fixed a date weeks or, more often, months later—in several cases in July, August, September, and even October 2026. For instance:

1. In CRL.REV.P. 22/2026, ordered on January 13, the matter was listed for March 2.

2. In CRL.REV.P. 27/2026, ordered on January 14, it was listed for July 27.

3. In CRL.REV.P. 25/2026, also ordered on January 14, it was listed for July 14.

4. In CRL.REV.P. 48/2026, ordered on February 4, the next date was July 14.

5. In CRL.REV.P. 52/2026, ordered on February 27, the next date was September 15.

6. In CRL.REV.P. 65/2026, a CBI matter ordered on January 29, the case was listed for July 24.

7. In CRL.REV.P. 99/2026, ordered on February 13, the matter was listed for August 12.

8. In one directly comparable matter, CRL.REV.P. 95/2026—a CBI challenge to a discharge order—notice was issued on February 12, and the matter was made returnable only on August 12, six months later.

9. After the March 9 order in Kejriwal’s case, the pattern persisted: CRL.REV.P. 147/2026, ordered on March 12, was listed for October 12. CRL.REV.P. 154/2026, ordered on March 13, for July 23. And CRL.REV.P. 157/2026, ordered on March 16, for September 24.

2/16

By contrast, in the CBI–Kejriwal revision (CRL.REV.P. 134/2026), Justice Sharma moved with unusual and exceptional speed from the very first date, standing out starkly and reflecting a radically different judicial tempo, asking Kejriwal and others to file their replies, against a hefty volume of judgment and CBI affidavit, within one week.

Speed, by itself, is not a problem. Indian courts are rarely criticised for moving too fast. But selective speed can become a clue.

3/16

On the very first day, Justice Sharma also:

1. Recorded that parts of the Trial Court’s reasoning on witnesses and approvers “prima facie appear erroneous”.

2. Stayed the Trial Court’s adverse observations against the Investigating Officer, whom it found had “abused his official position to conduct an unfair investigation”.

3. Stayed the Trial Court’s order recommending departmental action against the Investigating Officer, stating that it was “foundationally misconceived”.

The bench did not stop there.

4. Asked the court dealing with the connected Enforcement Directorate case to await the High Court’s decision in this appeal before hearing the PMLA case, done out of the way since no such relief was prayed for by the CBI! Given that a PMLA case rests entirely on a predicate offence (the CBI’s FIR), the case would have fallen if not for this order of Justice Sharma.

4/16

All this sweeping reliefs, without any of the 23 discharged being represented or heard. This is in stark contrast with Justice Sharma's own pattern in other cases. For instance:

In CRL.REV.P. 86/2026, when no one appeared for the petitioners, the Court simply deferred adverse orders and listed the matter for May 6, 2026. But in the present case, the absence of the 23 discharged did not lead to the same deferment or a routine notice order. Instead, it led to prima facie criticism of the Trial Court and sweeping directions, including protecting the ED's case.

5/16

Days later, Kejriwal and eight others petitioned the Chief Justice of the High Court to reassign the case from Justice Sharma’s bench, alleging a “reasonable apprehension of bias”. The request was rejected, against which they have approached the Supreme Court.

On the second hearing, a heated argument ensued in Justice Sharma’s courtroom. Despite requests to defer the hearing by a week so the Supreme Court could hear the pending challenge against reassignment, Justice Sharma was unrelenting, warning the 23 discharged to file their replies by the next date of hearing or lose the opportunity, and fixed the hearing after just three weeks, on April 6.

6/16

There is no doubt that this extraordinary request comes against the backdrop of a longer judicial record in which Justice Sharma has repeatedly authored long, detailed orders in the Delhi excise-policy cases, substantially endorsing the prosecution’s theory against Aam Aadmi Party leaders at different stages, such as bail, often in unusually assertive language, and in at least some cases inviting scathing correction from the Supreme Court.

7/16

I also analyse Justice Sharma's judgments in a cluster of Liquor Gate cases that were before her in the past. A pattern clearly emerged.

Justice Sharma spent considerable time not merely addressing the legal thresholds for bail under the PMLA and the CBI case, but also narrating delay, responsibility, destruction of evidence, public office, corruption, public consultation, and the moral function of courts in economic offences. For instance, while rejecting Manish Sisodia's bail, she remarked that Sisodia was a powerful power centre who could influence witnesses and public servants, that non-recovery of money could not disprove corruption, that the policy’s consultation exercise was a form of camouflage. The Supreme Court, in August 2024, while granting bail to Sisodia, criticised parts of Justice Sharma’s order as made in "ignorance of the observations of the Supreme Court", etc.

There were also moral observations in Justice Sharma’s judgment, which the Supreme Court indicated was an “open-and-shut case” for bail.

8/16

A judge is, of course, entitled to write strongly. But when such rhetoric becomes the language through which one repeatedly describes the same prosecution cluster, a later apprehension that the judge has become too invested in the prosecutorial story cannot be dismissed as simple paranoia.

All this may or may not prove actual bias. But the principle of recusal does not require proof of actual bias. It asks whether the apprehension of bias is reasonable.

9/16

Understandably, the anxiety around Justice Sharma is not confined to AAP leaders’ cases alone. Justice Sharma had overturned:

1. Discharge of Sharjeel Imam, Safoora Zargar, Asif Iqbal Tanha, and others in the Jamia violence case.

2. In the Zeeshan Haider–Daud Nasir matter linked to the ED’s case against AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan, Justice Sharma’s July 2024 order denying bail repeatedly adopted the prosecution’s language in strikingly assertive terms, speaking of “ill-gotten money” and a criminal conspiracy hatched with associates.

It is this feature that recurs in several of Justice Sharma’s high-profile orders: the absorption of the prosecution’s case so deeply into the judgment that the line between prima facie assessment and near-final narrative begins to blur. That is what makes the present reassignment request more serious than a complaint about adverse judicial outcomes.

10/16

The contrast is unmissable in some cases.

When former BJP Union Minister Dilip Ray sought suspension of his conviction in the coal block allocation case to enable him to contest elections, Justice Sharma stayed the conviction in April 2024.

The judgment spoke of the “irreversible” electoral and political consequences of disqualification, referred to Ray’s “political career running into more than 35 years”, and treated the inability to contest as an injury serious enough to justify intervention.

The contrast is difficult to ignore. In opposition-linked prosecutions, especially the excise-policy matters, Justice Sharma’s orders often read as deeply attentive to influence, conspiracy, destruction of evidence, and the need for courts to send moral signals against corruption, denying bail—even when similar “irreversible electoral and political consequences” arguments applied to those opposition leaders during the 2024 election.

That contrast sharpens the appearance problem.

11/16

The Supreme Court has repeatedly stressed that justice must not only be done but also be SEEN to be done, while warning against reckless demands that amount to bench-hunting.

Seen in that light, the issue before Justice Sharma’s bench was never whether Kejriwal and others could prove what she privately thought of them or of the AAP.

The question is whether these circumstances created an objectively reasonable apprehension that the CBI–Kejriwal revision case would not receive the kind of FRESH NEUTRALITY that such a politically sensitive matter demands.

12/16

Once a judge has repeatedly written detailed orders endorsing the prosecution’s architecture in the same case cluster, and once those orders display a recurring style of expansive and morally charged prima facie narration, and once some of those orders later run into serious appellate correction, and once the same judge then handles the State’s challenge to discharge by moving at exceptional speed—irregular and unusual compared to her usual judicial tempo—entering prima facie disagreement with the discharge order before even hearing the discharged side, protecting the investigating officer from trial court criticism, and going out of the way to preserve the connected ED case even when the relief was not explicitly sought, recusal begins to look like an institutional safety valve.

13/16

The important question that arises in this specific case is this: when a judge has already written herself deeply into the prosecution’s story across a cluster of connected proceedings, and then handles a challenge to discharge with exceptional urgency and sweeping first-date interventions without hearing the other side, does the continued hearing of the case begin to compromise the appearance of neutrality?

Given that a former Chief Minister has moved a motion of no-confidence against the judge at the risk of “burning bridges” with the court, that fact must carry some weight.

14/16

Couple this with Justice Sharma’s wider track record:

1. Her selective urgency in the case of an opposition leader, in stark contrast to the pattern that emerged in my analysis of the 17 other similar cases.

2. Her expansive, often moralising orders in at least five of the liquor scam cases.

3. The contrast with her sympathetic treatment of former BJP Union Minister Dilip Ray, talking of “irreversible” damage that conviction would cause to his “long political career” and electoral prospects.

4. Her repeated public appearances at events organised by the RSS-affiliated lawyers’ group Adhivakta Parishad.

5. The prolonged pendency of liberty-sensitive matters such as AAP leader Naresh Balyan’s bail plea before her.

6. And, on the other hand, the apparent expedition shown in politically sensitive matters, such as the Lalu Prasad Yadav case.

15/16

Taken together, these features deepen the appearance problem and make the plea for recusal or reassignment look less like forum-shopping and more like a serious institutional demand that justice not only be done, but be SEEN to be done. If the principle that justice must also be seen to be done means anything, it must mean something in this case too, at least for the sake of the institution.

There are moments when the legitimacy of a court does not turn on what it will finally decide, but on whether it ought to decide a case at all. This is one such moment.

16/16

More on this, in my fortnightly 'Case In Point' column for @frontline_india.

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