Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma of the Delhi high court on April 20 dismissed former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s recusal plea in the Delhi excise-policy case. The signed order runs to 115 pages. She held that a litigant cannot dictate how a judge’s children conduct their professional lives. The empanelment of her relatives as central government counsel, she ruled, bore no demonstrated nexus to the proceedings. Unfounded insinuation, she said, cannot be elevated into a ground of bias. Five co-accused joined Kejriwal in the application: Manish Sisodia, Vijay Nair, Rajesh Joshi, Arun Ramachandran Pillai and Durgesh Pathak. The matter arises from the Central Bureau of Investigation’s revision petition against the trial court’s February 27 discharge order.The refusal must be tested against the recusal jurisprudence the Supreme Court has been building since 1987. Prashant Bhushan’s critique on X, which followed the order within hours, goes to the doctrinal core. It suggests that the judge misread the very law she was applying.The anchor and its qualificationsThe anchoring authority remains Ranjit Thakur v. Union of India (1987). Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah there held that the test of bias is perspectival, not introspective. The judge must look not at her own mind, but at the mind of the party before her. Reasonableness of the apprehension, not proof of actual prejudice, is the touchstone. Justice must not only be done but manifestly be seen to be done.That generous standard did not remain unqualified. In State of Punjab v. Davinder Pal Singh Bhullar (2011), the Supreme Court tempered the Ranjit Thakur formulation. Justice B.S. Chauhan imported the English “real likelihood” rule: whether a reasonable person, apprised of all the facts, would have serious apprehension of bias. Where real ground for doubt exists, he held, the doubt must be resolved in favour of recusal. The judgment also developed the waiver strand: a party aware of potential bias who raises no timely objection cannot complain later.Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v. Union of India (2015) added the institutional dimension. Fali Nariman and Mathews Nedumpara sought the recusal of Justice J.S. Khehar from the Constitution Bench hearing the challenge to the National Judicial Appointments Commission. Khehar was a member of the collegium the NJAC was designed to replace. He refused. The bench held the conflict was universal, affecting every judge of the court, and invoked the doctrine of necessity. Justice Jasti Chelameswar separately distinguished automatic disqualification from considered and conscientious recusal. Justice Kurian Joseph underlined a further duty: a judge who recuses must record reasons, as part of the constitutional oath of transparency.The Mishra templateThe modern counter-pole to Ranjit Thakur is Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal (2019). A five-judge Constitution Bench was reconstituted to reconsider Justice Arun Mishra’s own 2018 decision in Indore Development Authority v. Shailendra. Senior advocates Shyam Divan, Dinesh Dwivedi and Gopal Sankaranarayanan sought his recusal. The objection was one of judicial propriety: a judge should not sit in substantive review of a judgment he had himself authored.Justice Mishra refused. Accepting the plea, he held, would “sound a death knell” for the independent system of justice. It would permit bench-hunting by litigants disaffected with prior judicial views. Legal predisposition, he said, is not bias. The four concurring judges deferred to his assessment, invoking SCAORA for the proposition that the judge whose recusal is sought must herself decide.Sharma against the lineJustice Sharma’s order draws heavily on the Mishra template. A litigant’s unease at prior adverse orders cannot ripen into a ground of bias. The corrective lies in appeal. Allegations of bias cannot rest on “remote circumstances” without “tangible materials with clear connection with lis”. So far as it goes, the logic is sound. Prior judicial opinion on law is not prejudgment.But her situation is unlike Justice Mishra’s in ways that matter. Justice Mishra was accused of predisposition carried over from a separate, earlier case. Justice Sharma is hearing a revision petition in which her own interlocutory observations form part of the running record. At the March 9 stage she held that the trial court’s discharge order was “prima facie erroneous”. The applicants contend that this crossed from tentative comment into a finding on the very question before the revisional court. Justice Mishra’s reasoning does not address this. He spoke of views formed in one case being carried into another. Justice Sharma must answer whether observations made within the same proceeding allow her to sit on its operative question without reasonable apprehension of prejudgment.A deeper problem attends the whole order’s register. It repeatedly demands that the applicants produce “material”, “evidence” and “proof” to “rebut the presumption” of impartiality. It treats “mere apprehension” and “personal perception” as insufficient. It insists that suspicion be “grounded in fact” and that apprehension carry a “tangible” foundation. Read together, those formulations shift the inquiry. The question ceases to be the objective reasonableness of the apprehension, and becomes the evidentiary sufficiency of the bias alleged. That is the test for actual bias, not reasonable apprehension. Bhushan’s criticism is that narrow: Ranjit Thakur does not require proof to anyone’s mind, only reasonableness to the fair-minded observer.The Adhivakta Parishad question, four days after Justice Oka spokeOne ground the order treats with particular brevity deserves more. The CBI’s own annexures record that Justice Sharma attended four programmes of the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad between 2022 and 2025. The Parishad is the legal affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The order describes the events as seminars on new criminal laws, a Women’s Day function, and professional discussions. It records, fairly, that Kejriwal pointed to no political speech delivered by the judge at any of them.On April 16, four days before Justice Sharma’s order, former Supreme Court judge Abhay S. Oka addressed an online gathering hosted by the Parishad’s Supreme Court unit on the theme “Robes Cannot Be Rented”. Justice Oka remarked that, as a sitting judge, he would have politely declined an invitation to speak on the Parishad’s platform. The body, he said, “does have political inclinations”. The remark was made by a retired Supreme Court judge at the Parishad’s own event. It was widely reported.That remark does not bind Justice Sharma. It does, however, supply the very perception the perception test requires the court to weigh. A fair-minded observer, informed by Justice Oka’s self-imposed rule, would at minimum regard the argument as arguable. The order does not engage it. It answers the broader proposition that judges should withdraw from the legal community, which is not the applicant’s case.Viswanathan as contrastOn April 1, Justice K.V. Viswanathan of the Supreme Court recused from Alchemist Asset Reconstruction Company Private Limited v. Raju Chappakal Pappu after reserving judgment, on discovering that he had appeared for the appellant at the CIRP stage while at the Bar. The bench recalled the reservation. A judgment heard to conclusion was un-reserved. The cost to institutional efficiency was real. The disclosure came from the judge himself.The contrast with the Sharma order is instructive. Disclosure of past professional involvement made a senior judge of the top court step back, at cost to the efficient disposal of a concluded hearing. Disclosure of a relative’s empanelment, within a structure of allocation controlled by the counsel arguing the matter, prompted, instead, a defence of institutional dignity. The applicant’s refined objection is narrower. The objection is not empanelment as such, but work allocation by the Solicitor General to the judge’s relatives. Whether that refined objection passes the perception test is a question the order gestures at without resolving. It returns, instead, to the proposition that bare empanelment cannot disqualify. That is not the proposition the applicant finally advanced.A jurisprudence that treats every political litigant as a bench-hunter will, in time, thin the protection Ranjit Thakur was fashioned to afford. Length, in a recusal order, has historically been regarded as inimical to the calm disinterest the doctrine requires. Justice Sharma’s 115 pages are often forensic and persuasive. Yet the vehemence of a refusal can itself feed the perception the test seeks to guard against.