Kejriwal using legal team to pass direction to Minister, says Delhi court

Delhi court rejects Arvind Kejriwal's plea for more legal team time in jail, citing misuse of allotted meetings.

A Delhi court on Wednesday rejected the plea filed by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal seeking more time with his legal team while he is lodged in jail. The court maintained that Mr. Kejriwal is not even utilising the two legal meetings permitted per week with his counsels solely for discussing his pending litigations and has rather used the allotted time for other purposes, including passing certain directions to his cabinet Ministers.

Special judge (PC Act) Kaveri Baweja of the Rouse Avenue courts said Mr. Kejriwal has failed to satisfy the court that he has been using the two permitted legal meetings per week solely for the purpose of discussing the pending litigations.

“The status report/note filed by the investigating agency indicates that the applicant had directed certain directions for being passed on to the Water Minister to one of his lawyers (whose name he refused to disclose to the investigating agency) during the course of a legal meeting,” the court said.

The court said Mr. Kejriwal had submitted during the arguments that about 30-35 litigations pending against him for which he needs to have consultations and discussions with his counsels, but, there does not appear to be any objective criteria for assessing if five meetings with his lawyers per week would be sufficient to address the concern of the applicant or that two meetings, which are permitted as per Jail Rules, are insufficient for this purpose.

“In the absence of any such objective criteria for assessment, the prayer of the Applicant for five legal interviews with his lawyers per week not only appears to be whimsical but also seems to have been made without any statistical basis or objective standards for assessment,” the court noted.

The court pointed out that regardless of the absence of any objective criteria for such assessment, if it will allow the prayers of Mr. Kejriwal, would the courts, or for that matter the prison authorities, be under an obligation to grant more than five visitation rights for legal meetings to other prisoners, who may be having more pending litigations than the applicant?

In the 15-page order, Judge Baweja referred to an observation made by the Delhi High Court in the case of Delhi MLA Amanatullah Khan where the court said that a public figure is not above the law of the land.