NEW DELHI: In a major setback for former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, the Supreme Court on Thursday refused to suspend his 20-year jail sentence in a 1996 drug planting case.
A two-judge bench of the apex court, headed by Justices JK Maheshwari and Vijay Bishnoi, said, “We are not inclined to entertain his plea for suspension of sentence.”
Bhatt had appealed against last year’s Gujarat court order convicting him under provisions of the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act and the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Arrested in 2018 in the case, he is also serving a life sentence in another case related to the 1990 custodial death of Prabhudas Vaishnani.
During earlier hearings, Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, representing Bhatt, argued that he had already served over seven years in jail and had been convicted for a non-commercial quantity of drugs. Senior Advocate Maninder Singh, representing the Gujarat government, countered that there was a conspiracy, the planted opium recovery exceeded 1 kg, and the jail sentence should not be suspended.
The NDPS case arose from the 1996 arrest of Rajasthan-based lawyer Sumer Singh Rajpurohit by the Banaskantha Police after drugs were allegedly recovered from his hotel room in Palanpur. Bhatt, then Deputy Superintendent of Police, Palanpur, was accused by Rajpurohit of planting the drugs to implicate him.
Rajpurohit claimed in his police complaint that the drugs were planted to harass him over a property dispute. Following the trial, Rajpurohit was discharged.
The Supreme Court ultimately rejected Bhatt’s appeal.