Former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Monday shared a video message giving reasons for his refusal to appear before Delhi High Court judge Swarana Kanta Sharma in the tax policy case. For one thing, Kejriwal again raised the issue of the judge’s sons and their association with the central government’s lawyers’ committees.
The AAP chief also detailed the “sequence of events” and alleged conflict of interest of the judge who earlier this month refused to recuse himself from the case on Kejriwal’s plea.
On Monday, in his four-page letter to a Delhi judge on the same subject, Kejriwal wrote: “Your Honor was admitted to the Delhi High Court in March 2022. A little over five months later, in September 2022, your son was appointed as a Group A Advocate of the Federation to the Supreme Court.”
He went on to detail how her two children received multiple state law appointments to the Supreme Court, and how her daughter was subsequently “appointed as counsel to the Group C Committee of the Supreme Court,” adding: “Taken together, these matters are, to say the least, troubling.”
Justice Sharma had refused to recuse himself from the case despite Kejriwal appearing in person and virtually before the court over the past week.
“Children who have been assigned cases by the Attorney General”
Kejriwal on Monday also argued that the CBI was the opposite party in the tax policy case and was represented by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who is assigning the cases to Justice Sharma’s children.
“Mr. Tusshar Mehta decides how many cases should be allotted to Your Honor’s children and what cases. If more cases are assigned to them, they get more fees.”
Kejriwal claimed her son was flagged with an “extraordinarily high” number of lawsuits, 5,904, between 2023 and 2025.
“This places him among the top ten lawyers receiving the highest number of such allocations out of a pool of nearly 700 Supreme Court bench lawyers, while many other lawyers received only a small number of matters, in some cases as many as one case in an entire year,” Kejriwal wrote in the letter.
Kejriwal said each listing represents an attendance fee of Rs $9,000 per day per table, which came to ‘one lakh rupees’.
The judge’s son and daughter did not respond to these assertions.
Read also: In Kejriwal’s 4-page letter to Justice Sharma who did not dispose of his case, a former judge comments on an RSS-related event
What Justice Sharma said about Kejriwal’s arguments
This is not the first time Kejriwal has alleged a conflict of interest citing Justice Sharma’s children working as lawyers in a government committee.
In an affidavit filed with his petition for her recusal, Kejriwal raised the same “apprehension of bias.”
In response, Justice Sharma said Kejriwal’s reasoning about her children would disqualify many judges across the country from hearing cases involving governments or political figures.
“Even if the relatives of this court are members of a government committee, it is important for the litigant to show the impact of that on the instant case,” Justice Sharma noted.
Arvind Kejriwal has now refused to appear before Justice Sharma in the tax case, in person or through a lawyer.
He also reportedly said that he is preparing to go to the Supreme Court against Justice Sharma’s earlier order in the matter.
