Supreme Court rejects Sanjiv Bhatt plea for suspension of sentence in drug planting case

The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to suspend the 20-year sentence of former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Sanjiv Bhatt in a 1996 drug planting case. 

A Gujarat court had last year convicted Bhatt under various provisions of the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act and the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Today, a bench Justice JK Maheshwari and Justice Vijay Bishnoi declined to entertain his plea for suspension of sentence.

Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, representing Bhatt, earlier submitted that he has already undergone over 7 years imprisonment in the case and was convicted for non-commercial quantity.

However, Senior Advocate Maninder Singh for the State opposed the submission.

"There was conspiracy, planted opium and recovery exceeded 1 kg," he said.

The Court then proceeded to dismiss the plea.

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.

Bhatt, who was arrested in 2018 in the drug planting case, is also serving a life sentence in another case concerning the custodial death of one, Prabhudas Vaishnani in 1990.

The custodial death took place when Sanjiv Bhatt was the Assistant Superintendent of Police, Jamnagar. The police had taken over 100 persons into his custody for an incident of rioting in the area.

His plea for suspension of sentence in the custodial killing case was dismissed by Supreme Court in April.

Bhatt was 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.