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

In 2010, Amit Shah, then Gujarat’s minister of state for home, was arrested and jailed on charges that he had ordered the state police to kill an alleged gangster named Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife Kausarbi and his associate Tulsiram Prajapati.

Shah was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation after the Supreme Court transferred the case from the Gujarat Police to the central agency to ensure an impartial inquiry.

But it was the Gujarat Police that first raised suspicions about the alleged involvement of police officials in the killings, in a report that it submitted to the Supreme Court.

The report had been submitted on the orders of Kuldip Sharma, a decorated Indian Police Service officer who had won the President’s Police Medal in 2001, and who was an additional director general of police in the state at the time.

Shah was released on bail a few months after his arrest. Two years later, a three-decade-old case against Sharma came back to life. In 2012, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, gave official sanction to prosecute Sharma in a case dating back to 1984, in which he had been accused of voluntarily causing hurt to and wrongfully confining an alleged smuggler in a police station in Bhuj...

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