Supreme Court bench comprising Justices JK Maheshwari and Vijay Bishnoi categorically dismissed former Gujarat IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt’s desperate plea for suspension of his 20-year rigorous imprisonment, declaring that the court was “not inclined to entertain the matter at all” and effectively exhausting his last legal avenue for interim relief in the decades-old drug-fabrication case.

Bhatt, who was serving as Superintendent of Police in Banaskantha district in 1996, had been convicted by a Palanpur sessions court for orchestrating the planting of narcotics in a hotel room occupied by Rajasthan lawyer Sumersingh Rajpurohit, subsequently arresting him under the NDPS Act with the sole objective of coercing the lawyer to relinquish ownership of a disputed property in Pali, Rajasthan, owned by Bhatt’s brother.

The elaborate frame-up was exposed years later when Rajasthan police confirmed Rajpurohit had been illegally detained in Gujarat at the time of the alleged seizure, prompting retired inspector IB Vyas to file a 1999 petition in the Gujarat High Court demanding a high-level inquiry that eventually led to Bhatt’s arrest by the state CID in September 2018 and his continuous incarceration in Palanpur sub-jail ever since.

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Having already suffered multiple legal setbacks—including the Supreme Court’s 2024 dismissal of his plea to transfer the trial outside Gujarat and the imposition of a Rs 3 lakh cost for levelling unsubstantiated bias allegations against the presiding judge—Thursday’s refusal marks the complete collapse of Bhatt’s attempts to secure even temporary release pending his appeal against conviction.

The controversial former officer, sacked from the IPS in 2015 after a series of disciplinary cases and separate convictions related to custodial death and evidence tampering, now faces the prospect of serving the remainder of his 20-year sentence without any further judicial reprieve in the 1996 NDPS fabrication case.

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