New Delhi, May 5 (IANS) Former Solicitor General of India and senior advocate Harish Salve on Tuesday said that AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal’s letter to Delhi High Court judge Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma amounts to terrorising or attacking an institution and attempting to be “prosecution, judge and jury”.

“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,” Salve told IANS.

“If the institutions decide in their favour, then they are great; otherwise, they are corrupt, dishonest and intellectually and morally,” he said, adding that this amounts to replacing a rule-based order with a person-based order.”

Salve said ultimately you have to have faith in the system. “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 send the message that you are trying to attack the institution. Trying to terrorise.”

“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”, he said.

In his communication, Kejriwal said that he has lost hope of getting justice from the judge and would follow Mahatma Gandhi’s path of “Satyagraha”. The letter came days after Justice Sharma rejected Kejriwal’s plea seeking her recusal from the case.

Earlier, Justice Lokpal Singh, a former judge of the Uttarakhand High Court, reacted strongly to Kejriwal’s letter to Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma, in which the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) national convenor stated that he would neither appear before her personally nor be represented by legal counsel in proceedings related to the Delhi Excise Policy case.

Justice Lokpal Singh told IANS, “The letter written by Arvind Kejriwal should be seen as a case of 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.”

–IANS

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