Gujarat Court sentences Sanjiv Bhatt to 20 years in jail in 28-year-old drug planting case

A sessions court in the Banaskantha district of Gujarat on Thursday sentenced former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Sanjiv Bhatt to 20 years in jail in a 1996 drug planting case. .Additional Sessions Judge N Thakkar convicted Bhatt under various provisions of the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act and the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and sentenced him to 20 years in jail along with a ₹4.86 lakh fine.While confirming the development, Public Prosecutor Amit Patel explained,"Under the provisions of NDPS Act, Bhatt has been sentenced to 20 years along with ₹ 4.56 lakh fine for the offences of financing illicit traffic, vexatious search and seizures, manufacture/sale of drugs involving commercial quantity. He has been further sentenced to 2 years and ₹ 5,000 fine each for framing and incorrect document, destruction of evidence, wrongly confining someone and forgery."These sentences (in the NDPS case) have been ordered to run concurrently (at the same time), he added. .Bhatt, who was arrested in 2018 in the drug planting case, is presently in jail and serving out a life sentence in another case concerning the custodial death of one, Prabhudas Vaishnani in 1990. Notably, the March 28 judgment (in the drug-planting-case) mentions the Bhatt should serve out his life sentence in the custodial death case and his sentence in the NDPS case consecutively. In other words, after the completion of Bhatt's life-sentence in the custodial death case, he would have to begin serving his 20-year-sentence in the NDPS case..Bhatt is known for being a vocal critic of the Narendra Modi-led government. He was dismissed from service by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2015 on grounds of unauthorised absence from service.Prior to his dismissal from service, he had filed an affidavit before the Supreme Court alleging that the Modi-led Gujarat government had a complicit role in the 2002 Gujarat riots..In 2018, he was arrested in connection with the 1996 drug-planting case. This NDPS case pertained to the arrest of a Rajasthan-based lawyer Sumer Singh Rajpurohit in 1996 by the Banaskantha Police following the alleged recovery of drugs from his hotel room in Palanpur. Bhatt was then serving as the Deputy Superintendent of Police, Palanpur.Rajpurohit, who was discharged in the case, later accused Bhatt and other police officials of planting the drugs to frame him. The same was done only to harass the lawyer with regard to a property dispute, it was alleged.A petition filed by Bhatt's wife before the Supreme Court challenging his detention in the then-22-year-old case was dismissed by the top court in September 2018. .While in jail in connection with the probe and trial in the drug-planting case, Bhatt was sentenced to life-imprisonment in June 2019 by a Jamnagar Sessions Court in a 1990 custodial death case. The custodial death took place when Sanjiv Bhatt was the Assistant Superintendent of Police, Jamnagar. Bhatt had taken over 100 persons into his custody for an incident of rioting in the area. One of these persons included one Prabhudas Madhavji Vaishnani. Vaishnani was in police custody for nine days. After being released on bail, Vaishnani died of renal failure. Subsequently, an FIR was registered against Sanjiv Bhatt and other officers for custodial death and cognizance was taken by a Magistrate in 1995.Earlier this year, the Gujarat High Court dismissed his appeal against the trial court's conviction and sentence in this case.