By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar — 2026-02-28

The Teflon Demagogue: Kejriwal Walks Free, But the Stain Remains

By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar

There is a particular species of politician in India -- slippery, self-righteous, and perpetually wronged -- who treats every courtroom exit as a coronation. On February 27, 2026, Arvind Kejriwal added another chapter to this tradition. A Delhi court discharged him, his former deputy Manish Sisodia, K Kavitha, and nineteen others in the excise policy case. The former chief minister broke down before the cameras, declared himself honest, held a roadshow through the capital's streets with flower petals raining on his motorcade, and then -- in a performance so theatrical it would embarrass a Bollywood debutant -- challenged Prime Minister Modi to dissolve the Delhi Assembly and hold fresh elections.

Within hours, the CBI had filed an appeal in the Delhi High Court. The case is not over. But for Kejriwal, the discharge was never really about justice. It was about resurrection.

What the Court Actually Said

Let us begin with the law, because that is where Kejriwal would prefer we stop looking.

Special Judge Jitendra Singh, in a 598-page order, discharged all twenty-three accused in the Delhi excise policy case. The language was damning -- for the prosecution, not the accused. The judge found that the CBI had failed to establish even a prima facie case. There was, the court held, "no overarching conspiracy or criminal intent" in the formulation of the excise policy. The prosecution had failed to "distinguish between legitimate political activity and criminal conduct." Continuing the trial, the judge concluded, would constitute "an abuse of process and result in a miscarriage of justice."

The court went further. It described the CBI investigation as a "pre-meditated and choreographed exercise" where facts were arranged to support a predetermined conclusion. Roles were "retrospectively assigned to suit a preconceived narrative." In an extraordinary rebuke, the judge ordered departmental proceedings against the investigating officer, noting the suppression of vital legal opinions -- including those of former Chief Justices of India -- buried inside an email dump of over fourteen thousand communications, "liable to remain unnoticed."

This is a devastating indictment of the CBI's conduct. On that narrow question, there is no ambiguity. The investigation was shoddy, the chargesheet was constructed backwards from a conclusion, and the prosecution deserved to fail.

But here is the distinction that Kejriwal and his supporters will spend the next twelve months deliberately blurring: a discharge is not an acquittal after trial. It means the evidence presented was insufficient to frame charges. It does not mean the underlying conduct was above reproach. It does not mean the excise policy was sound governance. And it emphatically does not mean Arvind Kejriwal is, as he tearfully proclaimed, kattar imaandaar -- rigorously honest.

The CBI's Self-Inflicted Wound

The BJP's response to the discharge was revealing in its discomfort. Amit Malviya called it a "miscarriage of justice." Delhi BJP chief Virendra Sachdeva pointed to destroyed SIM cards and missing phones. BJP MP Manan Kumar Mishra reminded anyone who would listen that a discharge order is not final.

They are not wrong on the procedural point. The CBI's appeal to the High Court will test whether the trial judge's reading of the evidence was correct. Higher courts -- including the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court -- had previously made observations in related proceedings that cut against the accused. The legal contest is genuinely unfinished.

But the BJP must also reckon with an uncomfortable reality: if the CBI's case was this weak, what was the point of the entire exercise? This was the Union government's premier investigative agency, with the full resources of the state behind it, pursuing the leader of a rival party through arrest, incarceration, and years of legal proceedings -- only to present a chargesheet that a trial court described as "discredited in its entirety."

Either the CBI is incompetent, or it was weaponised for political purposes with insufficient regard for whether the prosecution could actually succeed. Both explanations are damaging. The former undermines institutional credibility. The latter confirms exactly the narrative Kejriwal has been selling since 2022 -- that the excise case was a political vendetta engineered by Modi and Shah to destroy AAP.

Congress, predictably, tried to have it both ways. Pawan Khera called the outcome part of a BJP strategy to weaken Congress by periodically releasing Kejriwal before elections to split opposition votes. Abhishek Dutt pointed to the 2024 Haryana elections, when Kejriwal's release from jail preceded AAP's announcement to contest all ninety seats -- directly damaging Congress. There is a cynical logic to this theory, but it credits the BJP with a level of judicial puppet-mastery that strains credibility, particularly when the judge's order reads as a genuine judicial reprimand rather than a choreographed outcome.

The Hazare Benediction

Anna Hazare, the man whose anti-corruption movement birthed Kejriwal's political career, offered measured words from Ralegan Siddhi. The judiciary is supreme, he said. The verdict must be accepted. He described Kejriwal and Sisodia as his "karyakartas" -- volunteers -- and advised Kejriwal to work for society and the country rather than for himself or his party.

It was a gentle rebuke wrapped in an endorsement. Hazare had been critical of Kejriwal during the pendency of the case. His post-discharge pivot -- acknowledging that his earlier comments were made before the judiciary had spoken -- was gracious but also selective. Hazare's deeper disillusionment with Kejriwal predates the excise case by a decade. The man who sat on hunger strikes demanding a Jan Lokpal Bill watched his most ambitious protege abandon the anti-corruption movement, form a political party, and then proceed to govern Delhi with the same opacity and patronage networks that the India Against Corruption movement had been designed to dismantle.

Hazare's advice -- work for society, not for yourself -- is the kind of counsel that Kejriwal will quote in press conferences and ignore in practice.

The Arc of the Demagogue

To understand what Kejriwal's discharge means politically, you must understand the trajectory. And the trajectory is damning -- not because of the excise case, but despite it.

Arvind Kejriwal emerged from the 2011 anti-corruption movement as the architect of India's most potent populist experiment. While Anna Hazare provided the moral authority -- the Gandhian imagery, the hunger strikes -- it was Kejriwal who provided the strategic brain. When the movement splintered in 2012 over whether to enter electoral politics, Kejriwal chose power. He formed the Aam Aadmi Party on November 26, 2012, won twenty-eight seats in the 2013 Delhi elections, formed a minority government, resigned after forty-nine days when his Jan Lokpal Bill was blocked, and then returned in 2015 with a sixty-seven-seat landslide that annihilated the opposition.

That 2015 mandate was real. It was earned. Delhi's mohalla clinics, the improvements to government schools, the subsidised electricity and water -- these were policies that tangibly improved lives for millions of people. For a brief window, AAP looked like the answer to the question Indian politics had been asking for decades: can a party born from activism govern effectively?

The answer, as it turned out, was complicated. The school improvements were genuine but plateaued. The mohalla clinics were popular but insufficient as a healthcare system. The free electricity -- up to 200 units -- and free water -- up to 20,000 litres per month -- were welfare measures that bought loyalty but never confronted the harder question of fiscal sustainability. Delhi, uniquely among Indian states, benefits from massive central government subsidies and has limited infrastructure responsibilities. Kejriwal's freebie model worked in a city-state where someone else was paying most of the bills. Exporting that model to Punjab -- where AAP won in 2022 -- has produced fiscal strain without comparable results.

And then there was the Sheeshmahal. The renovation of the chief minister's official residence into what critics called a palace -- complete with imported fittings and lavish interiors -- did more to destroy Kejriwal's anti-corruption brand than any CBI chargesheet. The man who once slept on a footpath to protest electricity prices had built himself a mansion. The optics were devastating because they were true.

Electoral Verdict, Legal Verdict

The people of Delhi delivered their judgement in February 2025 -- eleven months before the court delivered its own. The BJP won forty-eight of seventy seats, ending AAP's decade-long rule. Kejriwal himself lost his constituency. Sisodia lost his. The party that had won sixty-seven seats in 2015 was reduced to twenty-two.

The BJP's campaign centred on the excise case, the Sheeshmahal, the unkept promises on the Yamuna, the air pollution that continued to choke Delhi every winter. The voters listened, and they chose differently. This is the democratic verdict that Kejriwal now wishes to relitigate.

His challenge to Modi -- dissolve the Assembly, hold fresh elections, and "I will quit politics if you win more than ten seats" -- is vintage Kejriwal: dramatic, quotable, and strategically meaningless. No Prime Minister will dissolve a state assembly because an opposition leader issues a dare on the day of his discharge. Kejriwal knows this. The challenge is not meant to be accepted. It is meant to be clipped, shared, and replayed on screens until it becomes the narrative.

This is what Kejriwal does better than almost any politician in India. He manufactures moral moments. The tears outside the courtroom. The Hanuman temple visit the morning after. The roadshow with brass bands. Every gesture is calibrated to project a man wronged, a crusader vindicated, a martyr restored. The performance is exquisite. The substance is hollow.

The Unfinished Legal Question

The CBI's appeal to the Delhi High Court deserves serious attention, regardless of one's view of Kejriwal's politics. The trial court's order was emphatic, but it was a trial court. Higher courts have previously made observations in related proceedings -- on bail applications, on the ED case that ran parallel -- that suggested a more sceptical view of the accused's position. Whether those observations translate into a reversal of the discharge remains to be seen.

What is clear is that the legal process will take months, possibly years. And Kejriwal will use every day of that uncertainty to rebuild his political brand. He will campaign in Punjab, where AAP governs and faces anti-incumbency. He will position himself as the centrepiece of opposition unity against the BJP. He will weaponise the court's language about "pre-meditated" and "choreographed" investigations to argue that every case against every opposition leader is manufactured.

When courts rule in his favour, they are temples of justice. When they do not, they are instruments of the regime. This selective constitutionalism is Kejriwal's signature move, and it is one that India's political ecosystem has yet to develop an effective antibody against.

The Deeper Question

Does the discharge absolve Arvind Kejriwal? Legally, on this specific case, on this specific set of evidence, yes -- for now, pending the High Court appeal. Politically and morally, the question is far more complex.

A man can be innocent of the specific charges brought against him and still be undeserving of public trust. The excise policy may not have been a criminal conspiracy, but it was an opaque piece of governance that bypassed normal procedures, enriched connected parties, and was scrapped by Kejriwal's own government under political pressure before any court weighed in. The CBI may have botched the prosecution, but the underlying questions about how the policy was designed, who benefited, and why it was abandoned remain unanswered.

Kejriwal's brand of populism -- free water, free electricity, free bus rides, promises extended without fiscal reckoning -- is ultimately corrosive. It does not build institutions. It does not create sustainable public goods. It creates dependency, wins elections, and leaves the next government to sort out the books. It is the politics of the gift, not the politics of the system. And it is precisely the kind of politics that a man who once marched against corruption should have the integrity to reject.

But integrity, in Kejriwal's case, has always been more performance than principle. He is cunning, adaptable, and ruthless in his self-presentation. He will emerge from this discharge more dangerous to the establishment than he was before his arrest -- not because he is honest, but because he now has a 598-page judicial certificate that says the prosecution could not prove he was dishonest. In Indian politics, that is more than enough.

The court has spoken. The CBI has appealed. The people of Delhi already voted. And Arvind Kejriwal -- survivor, shapeshifter, and perpetual victim of his own creation -- walks free into an India that may yet discover the difference between a man who was not convicted and a man who can be trusted. Only time will tell which verdict history honours.