In a major setback to tainted Gujarat IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, the Supreme Court of India, on 29th April, junked his plea to suspend his life sentence in a person’s custodial death that took place in 1990. Additionally, the bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta also refused to release Bhatt on bail. The bench, however, directed to expedite the hearing of his criminal appeal.
Justice Mehta ruled, “We are not inclined to enlarge the appellant on bail. Our observations made herein above are restricted to bail only and will have no bearing on the appeals of the Appellant and co-accused. The prayers sought by the Appellant are dismissed, however, the hearing of the appeal is directed to be expedited.”
Earlier, the Court had reserved the order on 28th February.
The bench was hearing the Special Leave Petition filed by Bhatt to challenge the Gujarat High Court’s January 2024 judgment which dismissed his appeal against the conviction and sentence.
Strikingly, the incident pertains to the death of Prabhudas Madhavji Vaishnani in November 1990. It was alleged to be a death due to custodial torture. Back then, Bhatt was the Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Jamnagar. Along with other officers, Bhatt took into custody about 133 persons, including Vaishnani, for rioting during a Bharat Bandh.
Vaishnani was held in custody for nine days. He died ten days after release on bail. After his demise, an FIR was registered against Bhatt and a few other officers for custodial torture. The magistrate took cognizance of the case in 1995. The trial, however, remained till 2011 due to a stay by the Gujarat High Court. The stay was later vacated and trial began.
A sessions court in Gujarat’s Jamnagar district sentenced Bhatt and a police constable (Pravinsinh Zala) to life imprisonment in June 2019. The court convicted them under sections 302 (murder), 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt) and 506 (1) (punishment for offence of criminal intimidation) of IPC.
Besides Bhatt and Zala, police constables Pravinsinh Jadeja, Anopsinh Jethva and Kesubha Dolubha Jadeja as well as police sub-inspectors Shailesh Pandya and Dipakkumar Bhagwandas Shah were also found guilty of custodial torture. They were convicted under Sections 323 and 506 (1) of IPC.
Later in 2019, Zala, Bhatt, Shah and Pandya moved the HC to challenge their conviction. A bench of Justices Ashutosh Shastri and Sandeep N. Bhatt dismissed their criminal appeal while observing that the reasoning given by the Jamnagar Court was correct and hence, there was no reason to interfere with the conviction verdict.
In the Supreme Court, Sanjiv Bhatt’s counsel Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal mentioned that his client had been under custody for over five years.
Sibal alleged that there was no evidence to convict Bhatt saying that the medical evidence suggested that the victim, Prabhudas Madhavji Vaishnani, died due to pre-existing medical conditions.
He further claimed that there was no medical evidence of any physical torture, adding that the death happened twenty days after the victim was released from custody.
According to Sibal, upon his release, the victim immediately met the family doctor, he did not make any complaint of police torture.
Gujarat government’s counsel, Senior Advocate Maninder Singh, refuted the petitioner’s arguments, noting that the medical evidence showed that the victim died due to renal failure. Singh noted that it was caused by the forceful sit-ups and crawling which he was made to do by the police throughout the night asserting that there was clear evidence that torture led to kidney problems.
Singh further added that Bhatt is serving a 20-year sentence in another case, relating to the planting of drugs to implicate a person.
He firmly added that there were no justifiable circumstances to suspend the sentence, especially after considering the cogent evidence on record as well as the other criminal antecedents of the convict.
