In a 1997 case involving abuse in custody, former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt was found not guilty by a Gujarati court in Porbandar. The verdict was handed down on Saturday by Mukesh Pandya, the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate, who said the prosecution had not been able to “prove the case beyond reasonable doubt.”
At the time, Bhatt was the Superintendent of Police (SP) of Porbandar. He had been charged with a number of offences under the Indian Penal Code (IPC), including administering great pain in order to get a confession. Because there was not enough proof, the judge gave Bhatt the benefit of the doubt.
Bhatt had already been given life in prison in a 1990 Jamnagar custodial death case and 20 years in prison in a 1996 case involving drug planting to frame a lawyer from Rajasthan in Palanpur. He is currently lodged in the Rajkot Central Jail.
According to the court, the prosecution was unable to “prove the case beyond reasonable doubt” that the complainant was coerced into confessing to the crime and turning himself in by threatening him and employing lethal weapons to cause him agony.
It also pointed out that the case had not been resolved with the sanction needed to bring charges against the accused, who at the time was a public official carrying out his duties.
Sections 330 (causing hurt to extort confession) and 324 (causing hurt with dangerous weapons) of the IPC were used to charge Bhatt and constable Vajubhai Chau, against whom the case was abated after his death, with torturing a man named Naran Jadav physically and psychologically while he was in police custody in order to coerce a confession in a case under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) and the Arms Act.
In response to the court’s order regarding Jadav’s complaint before a magistrate court on July 6, 1997, a first information report against Bhatt and Chau was filed in a Porbandar city B-division police station on April 15, 2013. The 1994 arms landing case had 22 the accused, including Jadav.
The prosecution claims that on July 5, 1997, a group of Porbandar police officers used a transfer permit to bring Jadav from the Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad to Bhatt’s home in Porbandar. Jadav received electric shocks to several body parts, including his intimate areas. Electric shocks were also administered to his son.
After the plaintiff later told the judicial magistrate’s court about the torture, an investigation was mandated. Based on the evidence, the court registered a case on December 31, 1998, and issued a summons to Bhatt and Chau.
The court issued a formal complaint against Bhatt and Chau on April 15, 2013. Bhatt is being held for life in a 1990 custodial death case in Jamnagar. In a 1996 case involving drug planting to frame a lawyer from Rajasthan, the former IPS officer was also given a 20-year prison sentence in March 2024 by a court in Palanpur, Banaskantha district.
Along with activist Teesta Setalvad and former Gujarat director general of police RB Sreekumar, he is also an accused in a case involving the alleged manipulation of evidence related to the 2002 Gujarat riots. After the Gujarat government dismissed Bhatt from the police force for unapproved leave, he appealed the Gujarat High Court’s January 9, 2024, decision to deny his appeal to the Supreme Court. The high court had upheld the conviction of Bhatt and co-accused Pravinsinh Zala under sections 302 (murder), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC for murder by the sessions court in Jamnagar on June 20, 2019.
On October 30, 1990, after a communal riot in Jamjodhpur town, Sanjiv Bhatt, who was then Additional SP, worked to detain about 150 people. A ‘bandh’ (shutdown) call against the suspension of BJP leader L.K. Advani’s ‘rath yatra’ for the building of a Ram temple in Ayodhya had sparked the disturbance. There have been claims of torture in custody after one of the detainees, Prabhudas Vaishnani, passed away in the hospital upon his release.
When Bhatt filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court in 2002, accusing then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi of participation in the Gujarat riots, he became well-known across the country. However, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) eventually refuted these claims. Bhatt was suspended from service in 2011 and dismissed by the Ministry of Home Affairs in August 2015 for unauthorized absence.
