Rajya Sabha MP Swati Maliwal’s petition to the Delhi High Court on Friday was denied. The petition contested the city court’s order to charge Swati Maliwal with corruption in connection with the improper appointments she made to the Delhi Commission of Women (DCW) between 2015 and 2016.
A court of law Amit Mahajan also rejected a second request that two former DCW members, Sarika Chaudhary among them, had filed to overturn the December 8, 2022, decision of the city court.
The municipal court’s judgment mandated the filing of charges against Swati Maliwal and three former DCW members under Sections 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act (criminal misconduct by a public official) and 120-B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which deals with criminal conspiracy.
According to the city court, reviewing the minutes of the meetings the DCW held on different dates, to which all four accused parties had signed, was “sufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused individuals made the appointments in question in concert with one another.”
Swati Maliwal said that there was no financial benefit alleged in the case, that all appointments to DCW—an independent body—were contractual in nature, and that the government’s finance department had properly approved them all in the high court petition to set aside the judgment.
The petition had claimed that the appointments were made on an as-needed basis to strengthen DCW as an organization. The criminal case against her was malafide, it said, and the DCW is entitled, among other things, to choose lawyers and other individuals who are actively involved in and knowledgeable about women’s concerns in order to accomplish the goals of the DCW Act.