AHMEDABAD: The Gujarat high court has rejected former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Sanjiv Bhatt’s requests to transfer his trial in a 1996 drug seizure case to another judge and pause the court proceedings for a month.
“Sorry, no stay,” said a single bench of justice Samir Dave on Thursday, observing that Bhatt was a serial abuser of the legal process.
Bhatt approached the high court for a transfer of the trial after the Banaskantha sessions court rejected his plea to transfer his ongoing trial from the presiding judge to the senior most additional session judge. Bhatt, who filed the application in June this year, said the judge serving as the special judge for drug cases in Banaskantha district, was “biased” against him.
Justice Dave noted in his order later that Bhatt was levelling “baseless allegations” against the trial court judge because he hadn’t received “favourable orders from the trial court”.
“All of this was done to ensure that the final arguments in the case do not start. As pointed out by the State that in the other case which pertains to (IPC section) 302 offence, the same modus operandi was adopted by the petitioner, wherein, he made scandalous allegations against the presiding judge,” justice Dave noted in his order.
“This shows that the petitioner is a serial abuser of the legal process. He has scant regard for the judicial process. By applying his knowledge of administration of the criminal law system in a negative way, he has been trying to cripple down the said system,” the order observed.
Bhatt, who was sacked from the force in 2015, was a superintendent of police in Banaskantha district in 1996 when Rajasthan-based lawyer Sumersingh Rajpurohit was held after drugs were allegedly seized from the hotel room in which he was staying.
The Rajasthan police later alleged that the lawyer was falsely implicated by the Banaskantha police to compel him to transfer a disputed property located at Pali in Rajasthan. Bhatt and his subordinate I B Vyas were arrested by Gujarat police in the case in 2018. During the pendency of this trial, Bhatt was convicted in a custodial death case.
