Ravi Sud

Arvind Kejriwal’s public letter to Justice Swarna Kanta Sharma is not an act of satyagraha as he would like us to believe, but far from it, is cheap theater, and poorly disguised theater at that.  The man suffers from a chronic and incurable condition: an addiction to spectacle over substance. Mr. Kejriwal has announced that he will boycott the very proceedings brought against him. An innocent man does not run away from a court of law but rather runs towards it.  Every innocent person knows that the courtroom is their greatest friend and their surest vindication. It is only the guilty who seek to delegitimize the tribunal before the verdict arrives.  Mr. Kejriwal’s flight from these proceedings is, in itself, the clearest and most eloquent admission of a guilty conscience. Unable to answer the case against him on its merits, he has resorted to the oldest trick in the crooked litigant’s playbook: convert a criminal case into a political martyr narrative. This so-called letter must be rejected, not merely for its contrived and recycled allegations, but must be taken up stringently as contempt of court.  The sustained, calculated targeting of a sitting lady judge of the Delhi High Court, by name and by public letter, with allegations designed to impugn her impartiality, crosses well beyond the limits of permissible criticism and enters the territory of judicial intimidation. I sincerely hope the Hon’ble Chief Justice of India intervenes quickly to stop this madness.  Mr Kejriwal is not a citizen exercising his right to seek recusal through due process, he already did that and the Court rejected it by a reasoned order.  This is a litigant, having lost before the law, now attempting to browbeat and bully a judge into submission through public pressure. Justice Swarna Kanta Sharma enjoys a well-deserved reputation for integrity and genuine independence.  I speak from personal experience, having appeared before her in highly contentious matters where the stakes were significant and the positions sharply contested. She has, without exception, brought to those proceedings an open, unbiased mind, one genuinely willing to engage with whatever material is placed before her, regardless of who places it.  That is the mark of a fine judge. And it is precisely because she is a fine judge, one who will not be moved by political theatre that Kejriwal has turned to this filthy strategy. One must, in these circumstances, do something that is perhaps unusual in legal commentary, and that is to pause and compliment this judge for her composure and her courage in standing firm against a professional heckler.  Please remember that Kejriwal’s entire political career was constructed on the architecture of blackmail and coercion - the Anna Hazare agitation was the launchpad, and that launchpad itself was, as history has increasingly revealed, built upon a foundation of fraud and manufactured outrage.  The methods that built his political movement are now being deployed against a court of law which can never be allowed to happen.