Ex-IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt's life sentence in 1990 case upheld by Gujarat HC

Ahmedabad: In relation to a 1990 case involving custodial torture, the Gujarat High Court dismissed Sanjiv Bhatt's appeal against his murder conviction and life sentence in 2019 from a Jamnagar sessions court, according to Bar & Bench. Bhatt has been incarcerated since 2018

The case began during Bhatt's time serving as Jamnagar's additional superintendent of police. Pravinsingh Zala, a former police policeman, was found guilty in the case as well and given a life sentence. According to The Indian Express, both parties had filed an appeal against the Jamnagar court's decision to declare them guilty of murder, Scroll.in.

“We have gone through the reasoning recorded by trial court while convicting the concerned accused persons for offences punishable under IPC Section 302 [punishment for murder],” a division bench of Justices AJ Shastri and Sandeep Bhatt said on Tuesday. “From the evidence placed on record, we are of the opinion that the trial court has rightly convicted [them].”

The prosecution claimed that Bhatt had arrested over a hundred individuals in relation to communal rioting that occurred in the Jamnagar district on October 30, 1990, following calls for a Bharat bandh by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

After being released from custody, one of the inmates, Prabhudas Vaishnani, passed away in a hospital from renal failure. According to Vaishnani's family, Bhatt and his colleagues tortured him while he was in custody, which is why he died. It was claimed that Vaishnani's kidneys were damaged by the police preventing the captives from drinking water.

The Bharat bandh was organised in protest against the arrest of LK Advani, the then-national president of the BJP, who was leading a rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh.

In April 2011, Bhatt filed a case in the Supreme Court against the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, claiming that he had incited the riots of 2002, which claimed 1,000 lives, most of them Muslim. On February 27, 2002, Bhatt stated that he was present at a meeting at Modi's residence, where the chief minister allegedly instructed his policemen to "allow Hindus to vent their anger."

Soon after making the allegations, Bhatt was placed on suspension and sacked in 2015. His department gave multiple justifications for his termination, including multiple charges of indiscipline, such as refusing to follow higher-ranking officers' orders and missing work without permission.

In July 2022, Bhatt was apprehended once more by a Special Investigation Team on charges of evidence fabrication and forgery in a case pertaining to the riots in Gujarat in 2002.