Born and brought up in Bombay, Sanjiv Bhatt is a Masters in Technology (M.Tech) from IIT-Bombay from the 1985 batch, who three years later joined the IPS in the Gujarat cadre.

It was about the same time that he married Shweta Bhatt, a classical dancer and a civil services aspirant like him. It is Shweta who has been fighting to have Bhatt’s conviction overturned, since he was sentenced to life in connection with a custodial death in 2019.

On Saturday, the Gujarat Police booked Bhatt in a case arising out of the Supreme Court order upholding the SIT’s clean chit to the Narendra Modi government in the state in the 2002 riots. The Court order questioned the role played by Bhatt — the deputy commissioner of the State Intelligence Bureau at the time of the riots — along with that by former DGP R B Sreekumar and activist Teesta Setalvad, in the allegations levelled against the Modi administration.

Bhatt is set to be brought to Ahmedabad from the jail in Palanpur in Banaskantha where he is serving his sentence, as the Ahmedabad Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) investigates the charges of forgery, criminal conspiracy among others against the three.

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Removed from service in 2015 on grounds of “unauthorised absence”, Bhatt had a turbulent police career of just over two decades, facing several internal inquiries and FIRs, apart from the conviction in the custodial death case. Several of these probes date from before the Modi government’s time, but saw action...

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