Congress leader Hardik Patel, 2 Congress MLAs and 27 of their supporters were detained on Wednesday while they were on their way to meet sacked IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt. Sanjiv Bhatt is currently lodged in the Palanpur district jail and has been awarded life imprisonment sentence by the court in a custodial death case.
As soon as Hardik Patel other Congress MLAs and supporters entered Palanpur to meet Bhat, the police arrested them. “Law and order situation in the jail in Palanpur may deteriorate. Hence, we detained around 30 people, including Hardik Patel, Congress MLAs from Palanpur and Patan and their supporters, when they entered Palanpur to go to the sub-jail to meet Bhatt,” Banaskantha’s Superintendent of Police Niraj Badgujar said.
On Tuesday, Shweta Bhatt, the wife of the disgraced cop had announced that she will accompany her husband’s supporters, most of whom are women and wanted to tie ‘rakhi’ to him, to Palanpur jail. Hardik had then announced that he would also accompany Shweta Bhatt to the jail. The two MLAs who have been detained are Mahesh Patel of Palanpur and Kirit Patel of Patan. While the police have allowed Shweta Bhatt to meet her husband, on the grounds of her being a family member, everyone else accompanying her to the jail were detained.
On June 20, Sanjiv Bhatt was sentenced to life imprisonment under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code. He was sentenced for the 1989 custodial death case. Prabhudas Vaishnani had died in Gujarat’s Jamnagar while he was in the custody of the police. Bhatt was serving in the district as additional superintendent of police at that time. Besides this Bhatt had also detained more than a hundred persons during a communal riot in Gujarat.
Bhatt had been arrested in September last year by the Gujarat CID over a 1998 case of planting drugs. He was then accused of trying framing a lawyer in a fake narcotics case