Aman Sethi - The mystery of India’s deadly exam scam - Guardian report on Vyapam
It began with a test-fixing scandal so massive that it led
to 2,000 arrests, including top politicians, academics and doctors. Then
suspects started turning up dead. What is the truth behind the Vyapam scam that
has gripped India?
In the night of 7 January 2012, a stationmaster at a
provincial railway station in central India discovered the
body of a young woman lying beside the tracks. The corpse, clothed in a red
kurta and a violet and grey Puma jacket, was taken to a local morgue, where a
postmortem report classified the death as a homicide.
The unidentified body was “a female aged about 21 to 25
years”, according to the postmortem, which described “dried blood present” in
the nostrils, and the “tongue found clenched between upper and lower jaw, two
upper teeth found missing, lips found bruised”. There was a crescent of
scratches on the young woman’s face, as if gouged by the fingernails of a hand
forcefully clamped over her mouth. “In our opinion,” the handwritten report
concluded, “[the] deceased died of asphyxia (violent asphyxia) as a result of
smothering.”
Three weeks later, a retired schoolteacher, Mehtab Singh
Damor, identified the body as his 19-year-old daughter Namrata Damor – who had
been studying medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Medical College in Indore before
she suddenly vanished one morning in early January 2012. Damor demanded an
investigation to find his daughter’s killer, but the police dismissed the
findings of the initial postmortem, and labelled her death a suicide.
The case was closed – until this July, more than three years
later, when a 38-year-old television reporter named Akshay Singh travelled from
Delhi to the small Madhya Pradesh town of Meghnagar to interview Namrata’s
father. Singh thought that Namrata’s mysterious death might be connected to an
extraordinary public scandal, known as the Vyapam scam, which had roiled the
highest echelons of the government of Madhya Pradesh.
For at least five years, thousands of young men and women
had paid bribes worth millions of pounds in total to a network of fixers and
political operatives to rig the official examinations run by the Madhya Pradesh
Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal – known as Vyapam – a state body that conducted
standardised tests for thousands of highly coveted government jobs and
admissions to state-run medical colleges.
When the scandal first came to light
in 2013, it threatened to paralyse the entire machinery of the state
administration: thousands of jobs appeared to have been obtained by fraudulent
means, medical schools were tainted by the spectre of corrupt admissions, and
dozens of officials were implicated in helping friends and relatives to cheat
the exams.
A fevered investigation began, and hundreds of arrests were
made. But Singh suspected that the unsolved murder of Namrata Damor – and the
baffling insistence of the police that she had flung herself from a moving
train – might be part of a massive cover-up, intended to protect senior
political figures, all the way up to the powerful chief minister of Madhya
Pradesh.
By the time Singh came to interview Mehtab Singh Damor, the
Vyapam scam had begun to seem like something more deadly than an unusually
large bribery scandal. Since 2010, more than 40 doctors, medical students,
policemen and civil servants with links to the Vyapam scam had died in
mysterious circumstances… read more:
