Sanjiv Bhatt is an IPS. He was an honest, effective, ethical and popular SP. He has been dismissed.
According to National Herald, “Bhatt was the only IPS officer of the Gujarat cadre who had testified in an affidavit before the Supreme Court that as an officer of the state Intelligence Bureau he was present in a meeting on February 27, 2002, when the then chief minister Narendra Modi directed police officers to take no action against Hindu mobs preparing to attack Muslims in retaliation to the burning of a Railway coach at Godhra in which 59 people were killed.”
He was dismissed from the services in 2015 for his alleged ‘absence without leave’, and for using official vehicle to travel to Ahmedabad, when he was summoned by the SIT investigating the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat.
But dismissal was not the end of his persecution.
An old case has been rehashed. He was charged with falsely implicating Purohit in 1998 in a case when he was Superintendent of Police at Palanpur. Purohit was arrested in a narcotics case but was acquitted when witnesses failed to identify him in the TI parade.
The case was revived after 20 years of the petition and 22 years of the incident, calling for an investigation of the petition.
Bhatt has been taken into judicial custody in Palanpur jail, a place where he spent fare bit of time as a Superintendent of Police. Jail employees brought him food and offered home cooked meal every day. Bhatt turned down the offers and opted to have food supplied to him by jail kitchen.
More than 80 days have passed and Bhatt is unable to secure bail. Palanpur district sessions court has been hearing the bail application of Bhatt since Septmber 5.
This is a sheer victimisation of an honest officer who decided to stick to his ethical standards, and ‘speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God’.
“Bhatt has kept a low profile, he is in close touch with non-BJP leaders from Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. He has been very active on social media. Bhatt has a very large following on Facebook and Twitter and has been very critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. Bhatt has 1,78,245 likes on his page besides 4,979 in his friends’ list. He has 3,94,000 followers on Twitter. ”, reported the National Herald.
Could it be his nuisance value on social media that has prompted the Gujarat Government to make an example of him? The strategy might just boomerang.
