SC Dismisses Former IPS Officer Sanjiv Bhatt's Plea Seeking Bail and Suspension of Life Sentence

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday (April 29) dismissed a plea by jailed former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt seeking bail and suspension of sentence in a custodial death case from 1990.

Bhatt is presently undergoing a life imprisonment in connection with the case. A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta also directed that the hearing of Bhatt’s appeal be expedited.

“We are not inclined to enlarge the appellant Sanjiv Kumar Bhatt on bail. However, we make it clear that the observations made herein above are restricted to the prayer for bail only and will have no bearing on the appeals of the appellant and the co-accused. The prayers sought by the appellant, Sanjiv Kumar Bhatt, for the grant of bail are dismissed. Hearing of the appeal is directed to be expedited,” said Justice Mehta while reading out the order, reported Indian Express.

In June 2019, a Jamnagar sessions court sentenced Bhatt, who was an additional superintendent of police in Jamnagar district in 1990, and police constable Pravinsinh Zala, to life imprisonment for custodial torture and death.

In October 1990, Bhatt had detained around 150 people after a communal riot in Jamjodhpur in Jamnagar district following a call for a ‘bandh’ by the BJP and the Vishva Hindu Parishad against the arrest and halt of BJP leader L.K. Advani’s rath yatra for the construction of Ayodhya’s Ram temple.

One of the detainees, Prabhudas Vaishnani, died in hospital after being released.

Though Bhatt and Zala had appealed against the Jamnagar court’s June 2019 verdict, a division bench of the Gujarat high court upheld the life sentence and murder conviction against the two this January. Bhatt has moved the Supreme Court challenging the high court’s order.

Bhatt is currently lodged in Rajkot central jail in Gujarat after he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019 for the 1990 custodial death case, and for 20 years in jail last year for a 1996 case related to framing a lawyer in a false case.

In December last year, a court in Porbandar, Gujarat, had acquitted Bhatt in a 1997 custodial torture case.

In April 2011, Bhatt filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court accusing then-Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi of “complicity in the 2002 riots”, in which over 1,200 people, mostly Muslim, were killed.

Bhatt was suspended from service in 2011 by the Gujarat government and then dismissed from police service by the Union home ministry over “unauthorised absence” in 2015.

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