The AAP’s Digital Guerilla Tactics met the Delhi High Court and that’s the beginning of the story.The AAP’s Digital Guerilla Tactics met the Delhi High Court and that’s the beginning of the story
The courtroom and the time line. Two separate battlefields and two different rules of engagement. In the past, the Aam Aadmi Party has been doing just that, converting every judicial defeat into political martyrdom and every win into a public, noisy triumph. It was a hard and clear line, however, that the Delhi High Court drew this week. Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma’s decision to initiate criminal contempt proceedings against Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, and a slew of top AAP leaders isn’t just another legal footnote in the never-ending excise policy saga. It’s a complete clash of the institutions. It poses a very awkward dilemma: what happens when the unrelenting machinery of political social media puts the judiciary itself on trial
You need to go back a little bit to comprehend the weight of Thursday’s order. It was a huge embarrassment for the CBI’s massive probe into the excise policy case as a trial court ruled in favour of all 23 accused in the case in late February. Kejriwal, Sisodia and others left behind the probe that had kept former Delhi C-Moondled Kaushal Pal for 156 days in the cells during the general elections. The judgment of the trial court virtually tore apart the agency’s reasoning. The CBI unsurprisingly went knocking on the doors of the High Court, seeking an appeal. That’s where Justice Sharma came in
But it was a very messy situation there right away.
The brass of the AAP didn’t want her on the case. They filed recusal applications, with accusations of the judge being ideologically close to the RSS, BJP in power. The AAP simply used its old tactic of challenging the politics of a justice when he refused to recuse himself.The AAP had resorted to its tried and tested strategy by challenging the constitutionality of the judge’s politics when he refused to recuse himself. They did not attend the proceedings. Kejriwal and Sisodia categorically said they will not appear in court.
Next came the digital assault. The edited footage of the judge’s speech at an educational institute in Varanasi has started to trickle out online. The social media postings were not so coordinated, especially from the heavyweight guys like Sanjay Singh, Saurabh Bharadwaj and Durgesh Pathak. This was a personal, aggressive and deliberate narrative. They were challenging a legal order, not merely. They were asking questions about the integrity of the robe-wearing person; they were engaging the family in the discussion; essentially questioning the bench to take dictation from the BJP.
The politics of the situation are almost palpable. When you think that you are losing the legal battle, you turn the board over. You make the judge your enemy. It’s a survival tactic. The anti-establishment, “underdog” mentality of the party makes the smearing of judges a very particular election stunt. It builds up the base. It produces a bad guy.
There is however a very thin, very hazardous line between fair criticism and institutional sabotage.
This is made clear in a quiet fury by Justice Sharma’s contempt order. “It’s not the dress I’m wearing that is so fragile that a few criticisms are going to matter,” she said in her comments. However, she noted that it’s always a “constitutional injury” when they select video clips to make it appear the video is politically motivated, then hold a separate trial on social media. We can’t fault the notion that judges should not be intimidated by politicians whose armies include smart phones. If one can easily frustrate a judge by running a smear campaign on him, the whole justice system fails. Each and every powerful politician as well as every prosperous businessman would simply create a hashtag when they had to deal with a hard bench.
The opposite is that contempt of court is a crude and old-fashioned remedy. It has been a controversial tool in the past, and is still considered by some to be an image-defensive measure by the judiciary. If, by fining criminal contempt upon those men who just beat the CBI in a lower court, the HC actually ends up giving a run for their money in the very sense AAP is banking on, it’s as if the system is against them.
That was something which Justice Sharma was well aware of. In an intriguing tactic, she changed the underlying excise case to another bench, saying she did not want the accused to allege that she was holding a grudge against them for their contempt. Making the move was a good and necessary one to maintain the integrity of the process. It doesn’t defuse the bomb, though. It simply encloses the range of the blast.
Agitation was the political base of the AAP. They are at ease in the dirt, at ease fighting establishments they consider hostile. But the High Court isn’t a political adversary that can be blitzed in a TV debate. It has real, structural implications, such as a very real possibility of additional jail time. As Kejriwal and his close group of associates are gearing up for these new charges, they are playing a serious game of chicken. They were looking for a fight off the bench. They didn’t get one inside it, though. This time the gavel could be sounding louder than the algorithm.
