New Delhi: Going by its chargesheet, the CBI’s case in the Delhi liquor policy matter hinges “largely on surmises, conjectures and inferential leaps unsupported by cogent material”, the trial court ruled on Friday (February 28) while discharging all 23 accused, including former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia.Holding with “no hesitation” that the material put on record by the CBI “does not disclose even a prima facie case, much less any grave suspicion”, the Rouse Avenue court declared that the “excise policy case … is wholly unable to survive judicial scrutiny and stands discredited in its entirety”.The CBI has reportedly filed an appeal against the order in the Delhi high court, arguing per a statement quoted in the press that “several aspects of the investigation have either been ignored or not considered adequately” by the trial court.While Kejriwal and Sisodia’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) celebrated the order and along with other opposition parties blamed the BJP-led Union government for politicising investigation agencies, the saffron party’s IT chief Amit Malviya has said that the judgment is a “miscarriage of justice”.Special judge Jitendra Singh in Friday’s order said that the CBI “failed to place any material which, even prima facie, suggests that” the 2021-22 Delhi liquor policy “was manipulated, altered or engineered to confer any undue or unlawful benefit upon any private individual or the so-called ‘South Group’”.“On the contrary,” it said, the policy “was the outcome of a consultative and deliberative exercise … in adherence to the procedure prescribed under law”.Neither Sisodia, who was Delhi’s excise minister and deputy chief minister when the policy came into force in July 2021, nor Kejriwal were present at ‘conspiratorial meetings’ or linked to illegal gratification per the evidence furnished before the court, judge Singh said.Sisodia was arrested and jailed in the case almost exactly three years ago in February 2023 and given bail in August 2024. Kejriwal was held in March 2024 and granted regular bail in September of that year. Both were in office at the time they were taken into custody.Kejriwal’s implication by the CBI, judge Singh said on Friday, “rests primarily on a solitary line in the statement of” prosecution witness and incumbent Ongole MP Magunta Sreenivasulu Reddy, which in turn was supported by the statement of his son Raghava Magunta, an approver in the case.“This raises a basic question in the law of evidence: whether the statement of one accomplice-like witness [the senior Magunta] can be treated as corroborated merely because it is supported by another accomplice or approver [the son],” the judge said. “The answer must be in the negative,” he went on to say, adding that “corroboration must be independent”.Elsewhere in its judgment too the court raised questions surrounding the role of approvers. It noted that prosecution witness and approver Dinesh Arora had had his statement recorded by the police under section 161 of the erstwhile Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) at least four times over the span of a year after he had given a statement to a magistrate under section 164.Statements made to the police under section 161 are largely inadmissible as evidence, while statements made under section 164 are admissible. The CrPC has since the time of the excise policy case been replaced by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanstha.According to judge Singh, the prosecution seemed to “proceed on the assumption that, upon tender of pardon, the approver is transmuted into an independent witness”. However the court is “unambiguous in holding that any statement of an approver recorded under section 161 of CrPC after tender of pardon cannot be treated as substantive material, even for the purposes of consideration of charge,” he said.Noting that one is given a pardon and made approver when they make a “full and true disclosure” pertaining to their knowledge of an alleged offence, the judge said that in Arora’s case “if the material on record were to suggest otherwise, the statutory course available to the prosecution was to consider … withdrawal of tender of pardon” instead.But the prosecution’s recording his statement under section 161 over a year’s span “gives rise to a legitimate apprehension that the approver’s subsequent statements are not the product of spontaneous disclosure, but of a prolonged and iterative process calibrated to suit the evolving requirements of the prosecution”, the court said.In criminal jurisprudence approvers’ statements are considered “inherently suspect” but in Arora’s case the prosecution “treated [them] as though they constitute unimpeachable truth” and relied upon them as the “backbone” of their case, per the judge.Later in the order the judge also took exception to the prosecution’s use of the term ‘South Group’ to refer to accused persons in the case who were based in south India.“In a constitutional order founded upon equality before law and the unity and integrity of the nation, descriptors rooted in regional identity serve no legitimate investigative or prosecutorial purpose and are manifestly inappropriate,” judge Singh said.He also noted that allegations under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) are “inextricably linked to the existence of a legally sustainable scheduled offence”. In the liquor policy case the anti-money laundering Enforcement Directorate had registered its own PMLA case based on the CBI’s ‘predicate’ case.“… The coercive measure of arrest and the consequent application of onerous bail conditions cannot be permitted to operate mechanically in the absence of a crystallised and judicially cognisable predicate offence,” he added, referring to cases where these measures are “invoked even before the foundational facts relating to the scheduled offence are judicially tested”.The then-AAP government had introduced the liquor policy for Delhi on the grounds that it would “curb monopoly and cartel formation by separating the functions of manufacturer, wholesaler and retail zone licensee”, as the court noted in its order.But the CBI had alleged that “certain public servants of the Delhi excise department acted in concert with private individuals and liquor businessmen … to secure unlawful pecuniary advantage for themselves and for favoured private entities”.