Delhi High Court judge decides to withdraw from Kejriwal excise case after initiating contempt
New Delhi: In a fresh twist in the ongoing CBI appeal hearing against the acquittal of all the accused in the excise policy case, Delhi High Court judge Swarn Kanta Sharma initiated criminal contempt proceedings against the former chief minister. Arvind KejriwalAAP officials Manish Sisodia, Durgesh Pathak, Sanjay Singh, Saurabh Bhardwaj and others abstained from hearing the main case.“Can’t surrender to a powerful litigant,” Justice Sharma said while initiating contempt proceedings against Kejriwal, saying he “launched a defamatory campaign” against him on social media instead of challenging the adverse orders against him in the higher court.She said she would now hear only the contempt case and transferred the appeal, so that the “defendants” would not later claim that she was biased against them. The judge said that while the hearing in the excise policy case was going on inside, “a parallel narrative was being constructed outside… and aspersions were being leveled on this court by contemporaries armed with political powers.”
Justice Sharma took exception to social media posts shared by Kejriwal and other AAP office-bearers which ascribed their “political allegiance” and targeted them by posting a misleading “edited” video of a speech delivered by them at an educational institution in Varanasi.Justice Sharma said, “After I refused to withdraw from the case, Arvind Kejriwal tried to destroy my reputation instead of availing legal remedies and this deliberate attempt to undermine the authority of the court under the guise of free speech cannot be allowed.”He said Kejriwal wanted to sow “seeds of distrust”, but warned that “judicial silence cannot afford to threaten judges into silence”.
Gandhiji’s Satyagraha won: Kejriwal
She said she would now hear only the contempt case and transferred the appeal, so that later the “defendants” would not claim that she was biased. The judge said that while the hearing in the excise policy case was going on inside, “a parallel narrative was being constructed outside… and aspersions were being leveled on this court by contemporaries armed with political powers.”Justice Sharma took exception to social media posts shared by Kejriwal and other AAP office-bearers which ascribed their “political allegiance” and targeted them by posting a misleading “edited” video of a speech delivered by them at an educational institution in Varanasi.Justice Sharma said, “After I refused to withdraw from the case, Arvind Kejriwal tried to destroy my reputation instead of availing legal remedies and this deliberate attempt to undermine the authority of the court under the guise of free speech cannot be allowed.”He said Kejriwal wanted to sow “seeds of distrust”, but warned that “judicial silence cannot afford to threaten judges into silence”.Referring to Kejriwal’s conduct, the judge said that hopefully the matter will be put to rest once his plea is decided.Justice Sharma said, “The plaintiff could have gone to the Supreme Court for challenge, but he did not, instead he released a video and repeated the same allegations and grounds which were rejected by this court.” He also referred to Kejriwal’s letter on X where he had announced his decision to boycott the hearing in his court.“The tone, tenor and manner of the criticism were not those of fair criticism. They have launched a campaign and social media campaigns have raised questions about the integrity, impartiality of this court,” the HC said. Detailed copy of the order is awaited. The judge read out parts of his order in a special sitting at around 6.30 pm and lasted for about 1.5 hours.Justice Sharma clarified that she is not recusing herself from the case but is transferring the matter to another bench as she has initiated contempt proceedings. “By selectively editing the letters and videos, the respondents tried to intimidate the court and tried to cast aspersions on my family members by dragging them in,” the judge said. He said they were intended as a “thoughtful insult”.Undeterred by Justice Sharma ordering contempt proceedings against him, the AAP chief lauded his decision to withdraw from the excise case. “Truth has won, Gandhiji’s Satyagraha has won,” Kejriwal said in his first reaction on social media platform X.
The sharp increase came a day after the UAE refuted the Israeli Prime Minister’s claim 
The four-member jury, each of whom had a different clinical lens to evaluate the nominees, shared how they chose the winners for the 2026 awards. The selection of award winners involved a two-stage process. The first stage involved selecting the top two contenders from the entries received in the respective categories, before extensive deliberations on choosing the winner, who was selected through secret ballot. Importantly, where a conflict of interest existed, jurors withdrew from both discussion and voting. Professor and Head of Department of Pediatrics at ABVIMS and Dr. RML Hospital. (Dr.) Dinesh Kumar Yadav underlined maternal care as a long-term investment for the country. “It’s not the safety of the birth process, it’s not the skilled manpower that is there, but the end result is that you have a healthy baby, who can grow up to be a good resource,” he said. With about 25 million annual births in India, Dr Yadav said the scope of assessment should be extended to adolescent health, nutrition and vaccination, which are the foundations laid long before a woman gets pregnant. For hospitals, Dr. Madhu Goyal, Director of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Fortis La Fame, analyzed the detailed checklist of NICU, blood bank, OT and LDR status, infection protocols, emergency response, rapid response teams, imaging facilities, fetal medicine specialists and more. However, she kept coming back to what the checklist couldn’t capture – women aren’t a percentage. “When an individual patient comes to you, they want everything to be perfect.” Dr. Goyal described a scenario that any physician would label a success – a premature baby, unexpected but ultimately healthy – that the mother had not experienced. Bridging that gap is about communication, he said. “The most important thing is communication.” Professor (Dr.) Manju Puri, Senior Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at SGT University, said that they evaluated the nominees through the lens of indicators while making a clear distinction between counting and measuring. For example, he said, the hemoglobin test is a process indicator, but whether the woman arrived at delivery without anemia is meaningful. “It’s not the numbers. There are numbers, big numbers in the public sector. “So those are the outcome indicators that we look at.” Dr Puri evaluated the nominees on maternal mortality rates, complication rates, perinatal outcomes, partogram maintenance, facility preparedness and response time and whether respectful care was provided. He explained that care costs nothing, while improving quality, in his framework, does not require large budgets or infrastructure changes. “This requires identifying what is broken, fixing the lowest hanging problems first, and sustaining improvement rather than treating it as a one-time exercise.” In Fertility and Fertility Care, Senior Director and Head of IVF and Reproductive Medicine at Max Group of Hospitals, Prof. (Dr.) Surveen Ghumman Sindhu evaluated the extent to which the centers provided care beyond clinical outcomes. “It’s not just the woman who is sad, the man is sad too. He’s in depression. So how many of us actually look at the husband and say, OK, I need to talk to you about things too.” Dr. Sindhu was equally vocal about language, for example, telling a patient that her IVF cycle failed was different from telling her that it wasn’t going to work this time. “Failed means she failed.” In their assessment, good fertility care begins three to six months before treatment, starting with pre-conception counseling, anemia correction, thyroid testing, and moving through how to communicate a negative result. The winners across the 13 categories of the Times Future of Maternity Awards 2026 were those who came closest to meeting this standard. In other words, it was not just about infrastructure and outcomes, but about the quality of care a patient experiences when things go according to plan and the quality of communication he or she receives when it doesn’t. Here is the complete list of winners in the gold, silver and bronze categories: 1.Comprehensive Maternity Hospital of the Year (regional)
