The Supreme Court on Monday imposed a fine of Rs 10,000 on former Indian Police Service officer Sanjiv Bhatt for challenging a Gujarat High Court order that directed a trial against him to be completed by March 31, reported Live Law.
Bhatt had moved the Supreme Court against a High Court order to expedite the trial in a 22-year-old case against him. The case pertains to the arrest of Sumersingh Rajpurohit, a Rajasthan-based lawyer, in 1996, at the time when Bhatt was the superintendent of police in Gujarat’s Banaskantha district. The police had claimed that they had seized drugs from Rajpurohit.
However, the Rajasthan Police later said Rajpurohit was falsely implicated by the Banaskantha police to compel him to transfer a disputed property located at Pali in Rajasthan. In June 2018, the High Court handed over the investigation to the state Crime Investigation Department, and Bhatt was arrested in September the same year.
At Monday’s hearing a bench of Justices BR Gavai and Aravind Kumar noted that Bhatt should cooperate with the trial for its expeditious disposal, reported Bar and Bench. “The parties in a criminal trial should be more interested in the expeditious disposal of the trial,” the top court said. “The grant of extension of time is a matter between the trial court and high court.”
However, Bhatt’s counsel and senior advocate Devadatt Kamat told the Supreme Court that the trial judge in the case has estimated six months more time for the hearing to be disposed, reported Live Law. He also said that only 16 out of 60 witnesses have been examined in the trial so far.
Kamat also said that after the High Court set the deadline, the trial court is not considering applications filed by Bhatt, which amounts to the denial of a fair trial.
Bhatt is also serving life imprisonment in a 30-year-old custodial death case. In April 2011, the former IPS officer had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court accusing Narendra Modi, who was the chief minister of Gujarat at the time, of complicity in the 2002 communal riots in the state.
A Special Investigation Team of the Gujarat Police has also filed a chargesheet accusing Bhatt, along with activist Teesta Setalvad and former Gujarat Director General of Police RB Sreekumar, of having fabricated evidence against Modi in connection with the riots.
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