The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the arrest of former Indian Police Service officer Kuldip Sharma in a 41-year-old wrongful confinement case and granted him exemption from surrendering before the trial court.

The order was passed by a bench of Justices Rajesh Bindal and Manmohan while hearing Sharma’s plea challenging a Gujarat High Court order.

Sharma’s lawyer IH Syed told Scroll that the Supreme Court has overturned the High Court order and granted the former officer relief in the matter.

The case dates back to 1984 when Sharma was posted as the deputy superintendent of police in Kutch. He was accused of assaulting and unlawfully detaining an alleged smuggler Haji Abdul, who is also known as Ibhalaseth Haji Ibrahim Mandhra, inside a police station.

The complaint, however, was filed not by Abdul, now deceased, but by a political worker Shankarlal Govindji Joshi.

Joshi alleged that he and Abdul had gone to meet Sharma on May 6, 1984, in connection with alleged police harassment in another matter and that the police officer assaulted and detained Abdul for about an hour.

The complaint was filed two days later on May 8, 1984.

In 2012, the Gujarat government granted sanction to prosecute Sharma, which revived the case.

After 12 years, in February, a Bhuj-Kutch trial court convicted Sharma and his co-accused GH Vasavada, sentencing them to three months’ imprisonment. They were also fined Rs 1,000 each with an additional 15 days in jail if they failed to pay.

In September, a sessions court confirmed the conviction order.

Sharma and Vasavada had appealed against the order in the High Court and sought an exemption from surrender. Their request was rejected.

Following this, Sharma filed the revision petition in the Supreme Court.

Also read: How a Gujarat policeman connected to Sohrabuddin probe was convicted for a 41-year-old minor crime

Sharma’s contention

Sharma has contended before courts that the case against him was flawed and driven by political motives.

In the trial courts, he argued that before the Gujarat government granted sanction to prosecute him in 2012, it had appointed a public prosecutor to defend him and Vasavada.

Sharma stated that this showed a contradiction as the government had first supported them as innocent and later approved prosecution.

When Sharma and Vasavada challenged their conviction in the sessions court and approached the High Court, the state government opposed them.

In his 2015 special leave petition before the Supreme Court, Sharma had alleged that he was being targeted because of “malafide” intentions of Narendra Modi, who was the Gujarat chief minister in 2012, and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Amit Shah.

Sharma said that in 2010, Shah, the state’s home minister at the time, was arrested and jailed in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case. Shah was accused of directing the killing of Sohrabuddin, his wife Kausarbi and associate Tulsiram Prajapati. Shah was later acquitted.

It was the Gujarat Police that had first raised doubts about the alleged involvement of senior officers in the killings. This internal report was filed in the Supreme Court on the instructions of Sharma, who was the additional director general of police.

Shah was granted bail a few months after his arrest.

Two years later, the long-pending case against Sharma had resurfaced.

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