Rakesh Dixit - Vyapam scam: CBI admission in Supreme Court may spell trouble for Uma Bharti
When the Central
Bureau of Investigation told the Supreme Court last Thursday that a forensic
laboratory had found that a hard disk seized as evidence from the main accused
in the Vyapam scam had not been tampered with, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister
Shivraj Singh Chouhan described it as “triumph of truth”.
However, if the
premier investigating agency maintains its stand at the CBI special court in
Bhopal that is hearing Vyapam scam cases, Union minister Uma Bharti may need to
answer some tough questions. This is because if the hard disk has not been
tampered with, an Excel sheet in the crucial piece of evidence lists Bharti, a
former chief minister of the state, against the names of several illegal
appointees in the scam.
The scandal pertains
to alleged payoffs for jobs and recruitment at the Madhya Pradesh Professional
Examination Board, which conducts exams for medical officers, constables,
teachers and auditors for the state government. In a petition before
the Supreme Court last year, Congress leader Digvijaya Singh and Vyapam scam
whistleblowers Ashish Kumar Chaturvedi, Prashant Pandey and Dr Anand Rai alleged
that an Excel sheet in the hard disk that had the word “CM” against the name of
at least 40 illegal appointees had been tampered with.
According to the
petitioners, the Madhya Pradesh police removed the “CM” references from the
list and replaced them with that of Uma Bharti and entries titled “Raj Bhawan”. On Thursday, the CBI
counsel and solicitor general Ranjit Kumar told the apex court that forensics
tests of the electronic storage device had found that it had not been tampered with. The Congress said that
the BJP’s celebrations are pre-mature. If there has been no
tampering, said Congress spokesman KK Mishra in Bhopal, will the CBI
investigate other BJP leaders such as Uma Bharti, late Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh chief KS Sudarshan and RSS leader Suresh Soni whose names figured in the
Excel sheet?
About the scam
The Vyampam scam first
emerged in 2013, with reports of candidates seeking government jobs and
admission in medical colleges allegedly paying bribes to government officials,
who in turn allowed imposters to take the entrance tests. At that time, Madhya
Pradesh Special Task Force seized a hard disk from Vyapam’s chief system
analyst Nitin Mahindra’s computer.
Prashant Pandey, one
of the whistleblowers in the case, who had assisted the Special Task Force as a
forensic cyber expert, had a copy of the contents of Mahindra’s hard disk on a
pen drive. Pandey later fell out with the Special Task Force and submitted the
pen drive with its contents to Congress leader Digvijaya Singh. Pandey claimed
that the contents of the pen drive were the untampered Excel sheets from the
hard disk that had been seized as evidence.
In their petition
before the apex court, the petitioners claimed that Madhya Pradesh Special Task
Force sleuths, directed by senior police officers in Indore, had substituted at
least 40 instances of the word “CM” in the original Excel sheet with that of
Uma Bharti in 23 entries. In an affidavit filed
in February last year, Singh had made the same allegation in court but the
Madhya Pradesh High Court, which was monitoring the Vyapam cases at that time,
dismissed it as baseless.
Singh and the
whistleblowers then moved the apex court, which, last year, directed the CBI to take over the investigations
into the scam. The Supreme Court had been monitoring the investigations since.
The CBI then decided to send the hard disk for a fresh examination to the
Hyderabad-based Central Forensic Science Laboratory. The laboratory’s report
was submitted in a sealed envelope to the apex court in November.
In the Supreme
Court
On Thursday, the
Supreme Court told the investigating agency to submit the sealed laboratory
report before the trial court instead, and said that it would not monitor the scam further as investigations
in most cases of the 170 cases associated with the scam had been completed. It
also asked the CBI to conclude the investigation into the 37 remaining cases within three months. The lawyer for the
petitioners, Vivek Tankha, said that his clients would now approach the trial
court. “We will present our
case [against the CBI contention of no tampering] in the trial court,” said
Tankha. “Digvijaya Singh will file fresh petition in the court next month.”
Uma Bharti
connection
Uma Bharti’s name first surfaced in connection to the Vyapam scam in
December 2013. At that time, an angry Bharti not only pleaded innocence but
also demanded a CBI probe into the scam to expose what she said was a scam bigger than the fodder scam of Bihar. Rattled by
her aggression, Chief Minister Chouhan sent Madhya Pradesh Director General of
Police to Bharti’s home in Bhopal to placate her. That was when her name as an
accused was dropped.
In July 2015, Bharti
said that she feared for her life, a statement that came when deaths of
people connected to the Vyapam scam were occuring with alarming regularity.
However, Bharti has not commented on the scam since the CBI took over the probe
later that year. Congress officials say
that the party was not interested in highlighting Bharti’s alleged complicity
in the scam earlier as it believed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi might not
be interested in bailing out a beleaguered Chouhan in view of the
not-so-cordial relationship between the two leaders.
However, in the past
year, Chouhan has gone out of his way to ingratiate himself to the prime
minister. He has frequently invited Modi to Madhya Pradesh and lionised him as God’s gift to India and as Yug Purush (man of an era). Chouhan’s tactics seem to
have worked, said Congress leaders. A large section of BJP leaders also share
this view.
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