Senior advocate and former Solicitor General of India Harish Salve on Tuesday said that Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convenor Arvind Kejriwal's letter to Delhi High Court judge Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma amounts to terrorising a constitutional institution and attempting to act as "prosecution, judge and jury" simultaneously. The remarks come amid a sharp legal and political controversy over Kejriwal's decision to boycott proceedings before Justice Sharma in the Delhi Excise Policy case.

What Harish Salve Said

Speaking to IANS, Salve said he has observed a troubling pattern over the past decade. "Since 2014, I have seen an increasing trend among certain sections of political society that they are the prosecution, judge and jury. What they say is right. And if you disagree with them, if the institutions disagree with them, then the institutions are corrupt," he said.

Salve warned that this approach effectively replaces a rule-based order with a person-based order. "If the institutions decide in their favour, then they are great; otherwise, they are corrupt, dishonest and intellectually and morally," he added.

On the specific act of writing to the judge, Salve was unequivocal. "If a judge passes a wrong order, you have a further right to appeal. This kind of thing, saying that I will not have faith in you, sends the message that you are trying to attack the institution. Trying to terrorise," he said. He further characterised the letter as an implicit threat: "It's like saying that if you dare hear the case against me, I will dig into your background and find out who your son is, who your daughters are, and I will do this to you, I will do that to you."

Background: Kejriwal's Letter and the Recusal Plea

The controversy stems from a letter Kejriwal wrote to Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma, in which he stated he had lost hope of receiving justice from her court and would follow Mahatma Gandhi's path of "Satyagraha". He declared he would neither appear before her personally nor be represented by legal counsel in proceedings related to the Delhi Excise Policy case.

The letter came days after Justice Sharma rejected Kejriwal's plea seeking her recusal from the case — a decision he had the right to challenge through a formal appeal but chose not to pursue through that route.

Former Judge Calls It Contempt of Court

Justice Lokpal Singh, a former judge of the Uttarakhand High Court, also reacted strongly to the letter, telling IANS it should be treated as contempt of court. "Once a decision had come against him, where Justice Sharma refused to recuse herself from the case, he had the right to challenge that order. But nowhere in the rules of procedure is there any provision to write such a letter to a judge," Justice Lokpal Singh said.

His remarks underscore a broader legal consensus that the appropriate remedy for a perceived judicial bias is an appeal — not a direct communication to the presiding judge that signals a boycott of proceedings.

Why This Matters

The episode raises significant questions about the boundaries of political protest within the judicial process. Notably, this is not the first time an Indian politician's conduct before a court has triggered debate about institutional respect — but the directness of the letter, and its public framing as an act of civil disobedience, has drawn unusually sharp responses from both sitting and retired members of the legal fraternity.

With the Delhi Excise Policy case still ongoing, how the court responds to Kejriwal's declared boycott — and whether contempt proceedings are initiated — will be closely watched in the days ahead.