On March 28, 2024, Sanjiv Bhatt, an ex-IPS officer who was involved in a 1996 case involving drug planting to frame a lawyer, was sentenced to twenty years in prison after more than two decades on the force. A sessions court in Palanpur in Gujarat's Banaskantha district handed down this sentence which brought an end to a legal battle that lasted more than 25 long years. However, this verdict is just one chapter in Bhatt's protracted legal battles. The legal problems of Sanjiv Bhatt began in 1990 when a communal unrest broke out during a nationwide bandh in Jamnagar, Gujarat over BJP leader LK Advani’s rath yatra. This was when Sanjiv Bhatt was the Additional Superintendent of Police in the Jamnagar district. One hundred and thirty-three people were arrested by the local police under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, Prabhudas Vaishnani and his brother being two of them. Prabhudas was hospitalised with renal failure and passed away ten days after he was released on bail. A case was filed against Sanjiv Bhatt and six other officers claiming that the police had tortured Vaishnani in prison. Vaishnani’s death gathered intense scrutiny at the time. Later, in 2011, nine years after the 2002 Gujarat riots, Bhatt filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court of India claiming that he had attended a meeting where then-Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, had allegedly asked top police officials to be easy on the protesters. However, an SIT probe held around that time proved that Bhatt had attended no such meeting. In 2015, Bhatt was sacked from the police service because of “unauthorised absence” from duty and not appearing before an inquiry committee. Sanjiv Bhatt's legal problems intensified in 2018 when he was arrested on a number of charges, including his alleged involvement in the 1996 drug planting case. In 1996, while he was the Banaskantha Superintendent of Police, Bhatt’s team conducted a raid on a hotel room in Palanpur that was occupied by a lawyer from Rajasthan named Sumersingh Rajpurohit. The team confiscated opium from the room, thereby holding the lawyer accountable under pertinent provisions of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. However, further events raised questions about the accuracy of the claims. The Rajasthan police stated that the Banaskantha police had unjustly accused Rajpurohit in order to force him to transfer a disputed property in Pali, Rajasthan. Bhatt was alleged to placing the drugs in the room himself, which further complicated the judicial proceedings surrounding the drug planting incident. The courts dealt Bhatt a blow the next year, in 2019, when they found him guilty of contributing to Prabhudas Vaishnani's death in custody during the 1990 unrest. His legal situation became even more complex when the court condemned him to life in prison for his role in the crime. On March 28, 2024, a sessions court in Palanpur, Gujarat, finally handed down its decision in the 1996 drug planting case. Sanjiv Bhatt was found guilty of a number of offenses, including forgery, criminal conspiracy, drug possession, financing illicit trafficking, and providing false information, under the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act and the Indian Penal Code.
11 May 2024
Bhagyashree Vaswani
