New Delhi: On Thursday (May 14), Delhi high court Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma did two things that appear, at first, to be in tension.  She initiated criminal contempt proceedings against former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his five Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) colleagues. The conduct, she held, amounted to an orchestrated social-media campaign against her. She then transferred the excise policy revision to another bench. Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia are accused in that case.

Just three weeks earlier, on April 20, the same judge had refused, in a 115-page order, to step away from the same case. Kejriwal himself had asked her to. What changed? And how can both decisions sit alongside each other?

The answer is that recusal and contempt answer two different questions. Once that is clear, the paradox dissolves. What remains is a sharper question: was the route the judge took the only one open to her?

What is recusal, and why did she refuse it in April?

Recusal is a judge’s withdrawal from a case because her continued participation might appear improper. The test, settled by the Supreme Court across decades, is whether a reasonable, informed observer would entertain a real likelihood of bias. The standard is objective. A judge cannot recuse on every complaint, because that would surrender the bench to litigants who shop for sympathetic courts.

Kejriwal, Sisodia, Durgesh Pathak, Vijay Nair, Arun Pillai and Chanpreet Singh Rayat had sought Justice Sharma’s recusal on three grounds. First, that her March 9 order had recorded prima facie that the trial court’s discharge order was “erroneous”. That observation, they argued, had been made after a short hearing in which the accused had no opportunity to respond. Second, that her children were empanelled as Union government counsel and received work routed through Solicitor General Tushar Mehta. Mehta appears for the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the excise case. Third, that she had attended four programmes between 2022 and 2025 of the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad, the legal affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Justice Sharma rejected all three. A prima facie view on a stay application, she held, is not a final view. Her children were among 600 to 700 empanelled lawyers, not a chosen few. Her appearances at the Adhivakta Parishad, she said, were professional engagements with the bar, not ideological declarations. To........

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