The Free Sanjiv Bhatt Cycle Yatra, a journey demanding the release of former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt and other political prisoners in India, reached the historic village of Ghasera in Mewat, Haryana, on September 4 morning, according to a media communique issued by the Countercurrents Collective in a well-known civil rights advocacy site.
Human rights activist Himanshu Kumar is undertaking the cycle journey from Mahatma Gandhi's resting place at Rajghat in New Delhi to Porbandar, Gandhi's birthplace in Gujarat. The journey is expected to take around one and a half months, with Kumar covering approximately 30–40 kilometres a day and stopping at villages and towns along the route.
The yatra is intended not merely as a journey of protest but as an effort to meet people along the way—particularly young people, women, students, farmers and social activists—and engage them in conversations about civil liberties, political imprisonment and the idea of justice, said the Collective.
The journey was originally scheduled to begin on October 2, Gandhi Jayanti. However, Kumar was unable to begin the cycle journey that day because he joined a protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities associated with the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. He was detained by the police for the day. Kumar subsequently began the journey from Rajghat on Saturday evening.
A Journey Through Ghasera
According to the Collective, the arrival at Ghasera carried particular historical significance. Mahatma Gandhi visited Ghasera on December 19, 1947, in the aftermath of Partition. At a time of enormous communal violence and displacement, many members of the Meo Muslim community of Mewat were considering leaving for Pakistan. Gandhi came to Ghasera at the invitation of local leaders, including Chaudhary Mohammad Yasin Khan. He appealed to the Meos not to leave India and assured them that they belonged to the country and were entitled to equal rights and dignity.
Contemporary accounts of the visit record Gandhi telling the community that the country belonged to them and urging them, for his sake, not to leave their homeland. The memory of that visit remains an important part of Ghasera's history.
Writing about his journey through Mewat, Himanshu Kumar described an encounter with local children: "The children asked me, 'Are you a rider?' It reminded me that when I was their age, I didn't even know what a rider was. But these children do." They then asked him why he was going to Gujarat. "I said, 'To meet children like you.'" The children responded by raising the slogan, "Long live Mahatma Gandhi!" "And the bicycle moved on towards the next stop," Kumar wrote.
Why Sanjiv Bhatt?
Sanjiv Bhatt, a former Gujarat-cadre IPS officer, became widely known after he alleged that then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had instructed senior officials at a meeting on February 27, 2002, to allow Hindus to "vent out their anger" against Muslims following the Godhra train burning. Bhatt later filed an affidavit before the Supreme Court stating that he had attended the meeting and that the administration and police were told to take a lenient approach towards Hindu rioters.
Modi and his government rejected Bhatt's allegations, and the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team subsequently found insufficient evidence to prosecute Modi in the wider conspiracy case relating to the 2002 Gujarat violence. The Supreme Court accepted the SIT's conclusions in 2022.
Human rights activists, however, allege that Bhatt's subsequent prosecution and imprisonment cannot be separated from his decision to speak out against the then Gujarat government. They argue that old cases against him were revived and pursued with the intention of teaching him a lesson for filing the affidavit against Modi and challenging the official narrative surrounding the 2002 violence.
Bhatt was suspended from service in 2011 and dismissed from the IPS in 2015. He was subsequently convicted in two separate criminal cases. In the 1990 custodial-death case involving the death of Prabhudas Vaishnani, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019.
His conviction was upheld by the Gujarat High Court in 2024, and the Supreme Court subsequently declined to suspend his sentence while directing that his appeal be expedited. In another case dating back to 1996, Bhatt was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2024 over allegations that he was involved in planting drugs to falsely implicate a lawyer. Bhatt has challenged his convictions.
The Collective said, the human rights campaign around Bhatt does not accept these prosecutions simply as ordinary criminal proceedings. Activists contend that the revival and prosecution of cases dating back decades must be viewed against the political context in which Bhatt emerged as a prominent critic and whistleblower on the Gujarat violence. The Free Sanjiv Bhatt Cycle Yatra therefore seeks not only his release but also to draw attention to what its organisers describe as the broader use of criminal prosecution and imprisonment against dissenting voices and political prisoners in India, it added.
From Rajghat to Porbandar
The choice of Rajghat as the starting point and Porbandar as the destination gives the journey a deliberate symbolic dimension. It begins at Gandhi's memorial in Delhi and will end at his birthplace in Gujarat, passing through Mewat, Rajasthan and Gujarat along the way, the Collective said. Himanshu Kumar plans to halt each day after covering around 30–40 kilometres. At every stop, the intention is to meet local communities and create spaces for discussion about democracy, dissent, civil liberties and the imprisonment of political opponents and activists.
Kumar is currently riding alone, but hopes that others will join the journey along the route. The yatra also plans to reach the prison where Bhatt is incarcerated and submit a memorandum to the jail authorities demanding his release, it asserted, adding, the journey connects several strands of India's contemporary political life: the question of political prisoners, the protection of dissent, the rights of minorities, the legacy of Gandhi and the continuing struggle over the meaning of citizenship and equal rights. Its passage through Ghasera is especially evocative.
Offering a parallel, the Collective said, in December 1947, Gandhi came to this Mewat village to tell a frightened community that it belonged in India and had equal rights in the country. Nearly eight decades later, a bicycle carrying a demand for freedom has passed through the same village. The road from Rajghat to Porbandar is long. For now, the bicycle has moved on from Ghasera, carrying with it the memory of Gandhi's appeal—and a contemporary demand for justice, it added.
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