DECCAN INQUIRER
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Editor: Nagaraja.M.R.. Vol.02.....Issue.30…...........28/07/2021
Sacked Gujarat IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt moves SC against refusal to suspend life term sentence
The petitioner questioned validity of HC's order when it admitted his appeal for consideration but refused to suspend the sentence
Sacked IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt has approached the Supreme Court, challenging the Gujarat High Court's order, which declined to suspend his sentence of life term imposed by a Jamnagar court on June 20, 2019 in a 30-year-old custodial death case.
Bhatt is currently lodged at Palanpur jail. The officer, who had earlier filed an affidavit against Narendra Modi over his 'role' in 2002 Gujarat riots, claimed that the HC failed to appreciate that he had been persecuted by the state agencies from 2011, though they defended him since 1990.
A bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan, R Subhash Reddy and M R Shah is likely to take up Bhatt's petition on Monday filed through advocate Farrukh Rasheed.
The petitioner questioned validity of HC's order of September 25, 2019 when it admitted his appeal for consideration but refused to suspend the sentence. As an interim measure, during the pendency of his appeal, he said his liberty must be restored as his conviction has not been confirmed.
Bhatt contended that the High Court failed to see that the present incident related to death of Prabhudas Vaishnani happened 18 days after his release from police custody on November 18, 1990. Vaishnani, along with 133 accused, were arrested after violent incidents were reported in Jamnagar due to arrest of L K Advani in Bihar during his 'Rath Yatra'. Bhatt was given charge of Additional SP, Jamnagar.
"The HC ought to have appreciated that the trial court did not consider evidence of court witness P P Pandey, Investigating Officer, then SP, CID Crime, Ahmedabad, who recorded statement of different police officers, clearly indicating no beating or ill-treatment of the arrested accused," his plea claimed.
Due to ongoing "political vendetta", he claimed, those witnesses who negated the alleged incident, were dropped.
He also claimed that charges were framed against him without due sanction from the state government.
Sanjiv Bhatt Case: In 16 Years, Gujarat Saw 180 Custodial Deaths – and Zero Convictions
Law enforcement in Gujarat left no stone unturned to ensure Bhatt was incarcerated. That deviates significantly from the norm.
While Sanjiv Bhatt’s sentence to life imprisonment in a 1990 custodial death case has raised questions once again on the consequences of the IPS officer’s claims about Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 riots, a Times of India report has shown that Gujarat isn’t in the habit of punishing other policemen accused of the same crime.
The report highlights, with the help of data accessed from the National Crime Records Bureau, that as many as 180 custodial deaths took place in Gujarat between 2001 and 2016 (the last year for which numbers are available). However, no police personnel have been punished for any of these deaths in this time.
The countrywide numbers are even worse — only 26 policemen have been convicted for 1,557 custodial deaths, most from Uttar Pradesh.
Notwithstanding the dire need for accountability in the police force, the figures draw attention to the context in which Bhatt (along with another policeman, Pravinsinh Zala) was found guilty in a case that is nearly 30 years old.
1990 custodial death case
Bhatt’s case dates back to November 1990, when he had detained several people (the numbers vary between 110 and 150 in different reports) for rioting in Jamjodhpur town on the day of a Bharat Bandh, called to coincide with the end of Bharatiya Janata Party veteran L.K. Advani’s rath yatra. The 1988-batch IPS officer, who was then additional superintendent of police of Jamnagar district, had been send to Jamjodhpur by then superintendent of police, T.S. Bisht, Indian Express has reported.
Among those detained was one Prabhudas Vaishnani, who was released on bail after nine days and allegedly died ten days after his release, while undergoing treatment in a hospital. His brother, Amrutlal, had then filed a complaint alleging custodial torture against Bhatt and eight other policemen. To Express, Amrutlal said that Prabhudas was a farmer and not responsible for rioting at all.
Cognisance of the case had been taken by a magistrate in 1995, but its trial had been stayed by the Gujarat high court till 2011, when the stay was vacated.
A week ago, last Wednesday, the Supreme Court had refused to entertain Bhatt’s plea seeking to examine 11 additional witnesses in the case. The former policeman had moved the apex court claiming that while nearly 300 witnesses had been listed by prosecution in the case, only 32 were actually examined. Many crucial witnesses, including three policemen who were a part of the team which investigated the offence, were left out, he had claimed.
The Gujarat government had termed Bhatt’s move a “tactic to delay the trial”.
A report released by Human Rights Watch in 2016 revealed that 591 people had died in police custody in India between 2010 and 2015 alone, according to official data. Representational image. Photo: Steven Depolo/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Incriminating numbers
In what is no great testament to either the legal system or the concept of accountability in Indian law enforcement, the narrative surrounding custodial deaths until now has largely focused on the lack of action taken against police personnel. A much talked about report released by Human Rights Watch in 2016 revealed that 591 people had died in police custody in India between 2010 and 2015 alone, according to official data. Police, the report revealed, were loath to follow arrest procedures, their impunity bolstered by a system that allows them to blame such deaths in custody “on suicide, illness, or natural causes.”
While the NCRB data considered by TOI for their report does not mention figures relevant to the period during which the custodial death for which Bhatt has been convicted took place, a 1992 Amnesty International report on the issue in India quoted 415 custodial deaths in the country between 1985 and 1991. The report notes that within that period, only two cases of action having been taken in situations of custodial violence had come within the purview of the surveyors.
first was for a case of the rape of a tribal women in 1986. A Supreme Court commission investigating the allegation found sufficient evidence to conclude that four police officers and two doctors could be charged with “having hatched the conspiracy for destroying the evidence and thereby keeping the accused constables from being prosecuted in a court of law”.
“The most recent case known to Amnesty International resulted in a Gujarat High Court judgment on October 23, 1991; six police officers were sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for beating Kantuji Mohansinh to death in 1982 and destroying the evidence of their offence. The same police officers had previously been acquitted in May 1983 but, in the only such case known to Amnesty International, the state appealed against that judgment to the court which set aside the acquittal and convicted the police officers.”
Indeed, like the Amnesty report suggests, the untold custom is that of the state government championing the cause of its police in cases of custodial violence or deaths. Which brings us back to the particular escape from custom seen in Bhatt’s case.
Why Bhatt?
Gujarat law enforcement’s efforts in stripping Bhatt of his powers, sacking him, taking him into custody for a 22-year-old drug possessions case and arguing for his life imprisonment in the custodial death case can be considered particularly insistent.
His wife Shweta, in an interview to The Wire, had alleged likewise and detailed extraordinary steps taken to particularly humiliate and corner Bhatt and his family. Their security cover was allegedly withdrawn without prior intimation, agency officials allegedly walked into their bedroom as Shweta was asleep seeking to question her husband, and the municipal corporation allegedly sent labourers to demolish ‘illegal structures’ in their 23-year-old house.
The alleged harassment began in 2011, when Bhatt filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court claiming to have attended a meeting on the eve of the 2002 Gujarat riots. He alleged that Modi, who was then chief minister and is now prime minister, at the meeting asked senior IPS officers to to let Hindus “vent out their anger against Muslims” in the aftermath of the Godhra train carnage.
In the affidavit, he also alleged that it was discussed in the meeting that the bodies of the Hindu pilgrims who had died in the Sabarmati Express would be brought to Ahmedabad before being cremated. Senior police officials had, according to Bhatt, then advised against this as they feared it would incite religious violence.
Several police officers investigating the 2002 violence and the series of alleged fake encounters have reportedly been targeted by the Gujarat government and continue to face consequences of their involvement even now. Some of the officers targeted were Rahul Sharma and R.B. Sreekumar, who like Bhatt had deposed before the Nanavati Commission regarding the government’s culpability in the riots. Satish Verma, part of the SIT probing the Ishrat Jahan encounter case and Kuldip Sharma, who pursued a corruption case which involved Amit Shah, were also reported targeted.
In late 2018, a Rajnish Rai, a Gujarat cadre IPS officer who was the first investigator in the Sohrabuddin Shaikh fake encounter case, was suspended by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
INDIA: A torturous wait for the end of torture
Even as the world commemorated the International Day in support of Victims of Torture as per the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT), there seems to be no end of torture for the foreseeable future in India. In fact, forget urgency, authorities in India seem to be completely uninterested in ending the criminal practice. The very fact that India is yet to bring in a domestic law against torture even 34 years after ratifying the United Nations’ Convention against torture in 1997 shows the apathy of its leadership. India, often called the world’s largest democracy, is only one of five countries with this dubious distinction. The other four are Sudan, Brunei, Palau and Haiti.
Why this apathy for such a heinous crime against citizens, usually indulged in by those bound by the constitution to protect the very same people? Well, the Government of India often adds insult to this injury by whitewashing the public secret of torture being endemic to policing in India and taking recourse in denial. Take, for instance, the position on state sponsored torture the then Attorney-General of India Mukul Rohtagi took in Geneva at the country’s third universal periodic review at the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2017. Invoking Gandhi and Buddha, Rohatagi said that
“Ours (India) is a land of Gandhi and Buddha.”… “We believe in peace, non-violence and upholding human dignity. As such, the concept of torture is completely alien to our culture and it has no place in the governance of the nation.”
Mr. Rohatgi was lying through his teeth as evidenced by the reports of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), a statutory public body to monitor and protect rights. The NHRC, in its annual reports, has repeatedly highlighted the prevalence of torture in the country.
For example, The NHRC in its 2017-18 annual report points out that
“Custodial violence and torture is so rampant in India that it has become almost routine. It represents the worst form of excesses by public servants entrusted with the duty of law enforcement. The Commission regards crimes like rape, molestation, torture, fake encounter in police custody as manifestations of a systemic failure to protect human rights of one of the most vulnerable and voiceless categories of victims. Therefore, it is deeply committed to ensure that such illegal practices are stopped and human dignity is respected in all cases. Besides awarding compensation to the victims or their next-of-kin, the Commission’s efforts are also geared towards bringing an end to an environment in which human rights violations are committed with impunity under the shields of “uniform” and “authority within the four walls of a police station, lock-up and prison, where the victims are totally helpless”.
Similarly, as per the NHRC’s own findings as well as the Ministry of Home Affairs replies in the parliament of India, the number of people getting killed in custody- both in police custody and judicial custody, is rising. For instance, the total number of people killed in custody between April 1, 2019 and March 31 was 1,697. Of these, 1,584 died in judicial custody while 113 in police custody.
Further, most of the victims of torture come from marginalised communities like Dalits, tribal people and minority communiies.
So much so for India’s official position of torture being alien to its culture! Unfortunately, despite the open admission of torture being rampant in the country by the NHRC, the institution often comes across as toothless in making the relevant authorities to implement its orders on things like compensation, let alone follow its recommendations on policy changes necessary to eliminate torture from the country.
To begin with, The NHRC’s recommendations are not binding on the governments, both at state level and on the union government. So they keep flouting its recommendations with impunity. For instance, the NHRC admits in its same annual report (2017-18) that state governments paid compensations in only 151 cases out of the total 757 cases it has recommended for compensation.
There are a hundred reasons behind continuity of the practice and the impunity the offenders enjoy. One of the most important of them is that most of the Indian Penal Code is borrowed from the British Raj’s penal code- made for subjugating a colony and not for establishing a rule of law country. The reforms the IPC needed after independence were never a priority by the acts of omission in the beginning and then acts of commission afterwards. In newly independent India, the most immediate and pressing concern of the leadership was bringing the impoverished country, drained by almost two centuries of colonial occupation and reeling under one of the worst man made famines in Bengal, to stand on its own feet.
Then, the later leadership realised that having a policing system aligned with the rulers, not the rule of law, actually helps them consolidate the power, intimidate and silence the dissenters and continue ruling. Naturally, they threw all the demands regarding police reforms, a must for ending torture, in the dustbin.
Further complicating the fact was a sort of indifference by the larger section of civil society on the issue of torture, brought primarily for the same reason as early Indian leadership. They too saw police reforms as a secondary concern while the country reeled under ‘more pressing’ problems like hunger deaths and caste discriminations. What they ignored, though, was the centrality of the violence in perpetuating poverty and many other ills as Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros brilliantly demonstrated in their book The Locust Effect. It is high time for the civil society to rediscover the linkages and press for police reforms including elimination of torture.
It is high time for the authorities in India to get their act together and make a concerted effort for ending the criminal practice forever. This can only be done by showing political will and pushing for a stringent domestic law against torture with mechanism for independent investigations into allegations of a torture. For example, if such a law against torture mandates the same policing agencies to investigate such allegations whose members are accused of committing acts of torture, the whole practice would become a joke. Further, this requires a lot of investment in fields like forensic sciences for shifting the focus of police investigations from torture based confessions to solid evidence. This goes without saying that this too requires a lot of political will!
International community too must urge India for enacting a domestic law against torture at the earliest and implement it.
Edited, printed , published owned by NAGARAJA.M.R. @ # LIG-2 No 761,
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