5 yrs on, Vyapam scam returns to haunt MP
Investigations into India’s biggest examination bungling is back on centre stage as the state prepares for polls
WHEN THE CBI TOOK OVER THE PROBE FROM STATE POLICE, HOPES WERE RAISED THAT THE MASTERMINDS OF THE SCAM WOULD BE SPEEDILY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE
BHOPAL: For longer than five years, the scandal has dogged Madhya Pradesh and the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government and still shows no signs of going away.
As Madhya Pradesh voters prepare to elect a new assembly in a single-phase poll on November 28, the scandal is back at the centre stage of the state’s political theatre. “Vyapam scam thieves will not be allowed to run away as Vijay Mallya did,” Congress president Rahul Gandhi declared at the start of his campaign in Madhya Pradesh in the third week of September, likening masterminds of the examination fraud to the business baron who flew to London in March 2016 as banks closed in on him to recover ~9,000 crore in unpaid loans.
A week later, Madhya Pradesh police booked senior Congress leaders Jyotiraditya Scindia, Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh for making “false allegations against persons of repute”— a charge Scindia said was an attempt by Chouhan to silence the opposition.
This was after Singh filed a complaint in a Bhopal court accusing Chouhan and other senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders of tampering with a hard disk that contained information which, he said, linked the irregularities to the CM.The charges and counter-charges have only kept the pot of intrigue boiling.
The Vyapam scam, as it is known, surfaced in July 2013 when the police arrested 20 impersonators appearing for the medical entrance examination in Indore. Vyapam is the Hindi acronym for the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board (MPPEB), which conducts a raft of entrance examinations for professional courses and government job recruitment tests for posts ranging from food inspectors to forest guards.
The racket, in which undeserving candidates secured high ranks by either getting proxies to impersonate them in the tests or through cheating by other means, involved a clique of politicians and bureaucrats that facilitated the fraud in exchange for bribes, according to investigators. Periodic revelations by whistle blowers and the mysterious deaths of at least 16 people associated with the racket, including some accused and witnesses, have kept the scandal alive and investigators busy.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the probe of the scandal three years ago.
POLITICS AND THE SCAM
Vyapam has dominated the political discourse in every election since 2013.
Kamal Nath, the Madhya Pradesh Congress president, and Scindia, head of the party’s election campaign committee, have raised the issue in almost all their public meetings to attack CM Chouhan, who in turn claimed the CBI had given him a “clean chit” barely six months before the polls scheduled in November.
“The CBI’s tardy probe has failed to expose several big sharks behind the Vyapam scam. There is much more to this than meets the eye. If a fair probe is conducted, the entire government will stand exposed,” said state Congress media in charge Shobha Oza.
The Congress has insisted that the CM is linked to the scam, an accusation Chouhan has refused to respond to in his election campaign speeches.
The BJP denies the charges and has accused the opposition party of smearing the image of Chouhan, who has been CM since 2005.
“The Congress knows that it cannot win assembly or Lok Sabha elections in the state without tarnishing the image of the chief minister,” Madhya Pradesh BJP spokesperson Rajneesh Agrawal said. “Congress leaders have raised the issue in almost every election in the last five years or so but people have given a befitting reply to them. The ensuing assembly elections will be no exception.”
CBI PROBE
When the CBI took over the investigation from a state police Special Task Force (STF), hopes were raised that the masterminds of one of MP’s biggest scams would be speedily brought to justice.
Much to the disappointment of thousands of students and activists involved in taking the lid off the racket, nothing of that sort has happened. The case is still being investigated.
To be sure, the CBI has registered cases against owners of private medical colleges suspected of involvement and booked an additional 1,100 people involved in different cases related to Vyapam, taking to 3,800 the number of people booked — in 170 different cases. It has also been investigating the deaths of people associated with Vyapam, finding no evidence of foul play.
The STF, in its two years of investigation, had already booked the then higher and technical education minister Laxmi Kant Sharma and then state governor Ram Naresh Yadav’s son, the late Sailesh Yadav, in the case.
The CBI’s decision to concentrate only on three prominent cases — the pre-postgraduate medical entrance test of 2011, and the pre-medical tests of 2012 and 2013 — and ignore other alleged irregularities has drawn criticism.
Suspected irregularities also took place in tests for the recruitment of transport constables and junior policemen, and contractual teachers for primary schools. CBI officials said on condition of anonymity that the agency did not pursue the other complaints as it did not find concrete evidence.
One of the CBI officials said: “The magnitude of the scam is so big that it’s not easy to wrap up the entire investigation in a few days or months. We got details of 1 million students who were preparing for medical exams from coaching classes across states and with the help of a foreign investigative agency caught 120 students. Since some of the students had become doctors, we got additional details of 800,000 doctors from the Medical Council of India, and we detected 30 doctors who had committed irregularities. There are still 50 students/doctors whom we have to trace,” the official said.
“We have also been able to nail the owners of the private medical colleges. These people were influential, but our investigations nailed them down,” said the same official.
Activists say the CBI seems to have been trapped in the Vyapam labyrinth and wants to get out of it.
Said Ashish Chaturvedi, one of the whistle blowers and complainants in the Vyapam case:
“The SC had directed that the cases be re-investigated, but the CBI is only taking the STF investigation forward, and has done nothing new.”
Anand Rai, another whistleblower, alleged that the CBI was deliberately delaying the investigations so that the cases get diluted over time.
CBI’s chief information officer Abhishek Dayal, in response to a detailed questionnaire, responded with a list of cases being investigated by the CBI and added: “Pending a few cases under investigation, charge-sheets have been filed and several cases have ended in conviction so far.”
On March 28, 2014, the Enforcement Directorate, which investigates violations of foreign exchange rules, registered cases under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act against 27 people, including Laxmikant Sharma, Vinod Bhandari, Nitin Mohindra and Jagdish Sagar, based on 10 first information reports by STF. So far, the ED has presented charge-sheets against Bhandari and Sagar.
LIVES DEVASTATED
Many students who have been accused in the case have claimed that they were not involved in the fraud and that evidence against them is flimsy, but the stigma remains. Many have tried to move on, but found they are stuck.
Satyendra Singh, a resident of Bhind and one of the accused, said:
“I did not even appear for the exam as I had failed in Class 12. Now my parents and I are facing trauma for a crime which I have not committed. It has tarnished my image and that of my family. Hopefully, I will get justice.
A Gwalior-based woman who is an accused and did not want to be named said: “I am pursuing BSc in chemistry, but the court case haunts me everyday,” she said.
“I was made an accused only on the basis of a phone call I received from a middleman. We did nothing more. I just hope that the court pardons us,” she added.
Another student said, also on condition of anonymity:
“We are not culprits but victims. We were trapped by scamsters and we fell for it. I hope the courts are lenient with us.”