Samikhsya Bureau
Sacked Gujarat cadre IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who got national limelight for taking on Prime Minister Narendra Modi over Gujarat riot, was on Thursday handed over a life term by a Jamnagar court in connection with a 1989 custodial death case.
According to the prosecution, Bhatt, who was posted as the additional superintendent of police in Gujarat’s Jamnagar in 1989, had detained more than 100 people during a communal riot there and one of the detainees had died in hospital after he was released.
The deceased’s brother Amritbhai filed a case alleging that his brother died due to custodial torture by eight policemen, including Bhatt and then constable Pravin Zala, who has also been awarded life imprisonment.
On June 12, the Supreme Court dismissed Bhatt’s petition seeking a direction to summon certain additional witnesses for examination during the trial in a three-decade-old custodial death case. The Gujarat government too had opposed his plea, saying that it was a delaying tactic at at time when the lower court has already completed the final hearing and was about to deliver the verdict.
Bhatt was suspended by the state’s BJP government in 2011 for allegedly remaining absent from duty without permission, and later sacked for the same in August 2015. However, it was widely seen as a vendetta against him for standing up to Modi.
Bhatt had filed an affidavit in 2011 in the Supreme Court against Modi, who was then the Gujarat chief minister, and accused him of being involved in communal riot in the state in 2002, which claimed over 1,000 lives. He claimed in the affidavit that he attended a meeting convened by Modi on February 27, 2002 (the day of the riots) where instructions were given to the top police officers not to take action against perpetrators of violence.
Bhatt was arrested last year in connection with a 1996 drug planting case. He has been in jail since then as the Gujarat high court refused him bail and the Supreme Court declined to interfere with the high court’s order.
