Vyapam back in focus

Chandrakant Naidu in Bhopal

The CBI has brought the infamous Vyapam scam of Madhya Pradesh back into national focus with a charge-sheet against 95 persons, including former higher education minister Laxmikant Sharma and his officer on special duty OP Shukla. 

The scam, in which Rs 20,000 crore is estimated to have exchanged hands, continues to be the albatross around the neck of chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan who has been at the helm for 13 years in the state. As many as 40 departments of the state government were involved in the scam one way or the other. But the state police chose to limit the probe to eight. Even the governor’s office couldn’t escape. The first citizen, his family members and staff were sucked into the scam. In a rare event an FIR was lodged against the Raj Bhawan incumbent.

Many questions

Tuesday’s charge-sheet, the third in four months, focuses on the examination conducted in 2011 for the recruitment of contractual teachers. The charge-sheet was expected to throw up names of the politicians and bureaucrats who influenced the recruitment process. But there are too many incongruities that raise several questions over the probing agency’s intents. Has the CBI painstakingly watered down the investigations?

Why have some key suspects like former chief minister Uma Bharti cleared without being questioned?

Why has the agency confined itself to the points pursued by the Special Task Force of the discredited state police? 

Why is there no conclusive assertion on the 50 deaths that occurred during the STF probe?

The 95 names in the latest charge sheet include 83 candidates who passed through unfair means, four Vyapam officials and eight middlemen. Of these the STF had already booked 56, including Laxmikant Sharma, before the government was forced to hand the investigations to CBI in July 2015. 

Sharma, out on bail in multiple cases, was arrested in June 2014, six months after the STF booked him. He resigned from the BJP the same month. He was released on bail in December 2015.

Excel-sheet ‘evidence’

The CBI has been quick to clarify why Bharti wasn’t questioned. Her name allegedly figured in the excel-sheet the STF had seized from two key accused, the then Vyapam chairman Pankaj Trivedi and principal system analyst Nitin Mohindra. This led to presumption that she recommended names of Chandraprakash Sharma and his wife Shikha Parashar. 

The CBI now claims the couple that hails from Laxmikant Sharma’s hometown Sironj had admitted to have approached the minister’s OSD, OP Shukla for recommendation. Besides, Trivedi and Mohindra had also not mentioned Bharati. So the CBI did not find it fit to question Bharti. 

“In the Excelsheet, ‘Uma Bhartiji’ is mentioned against the name of these two persons. The accused Nitin Mohindra and Pankaj Trivedi were interrogated... however neither in the memorandum recorded under Section 27 Indian Evidence Act, nor subsequently they revealed about the said word mentioned in the Excelsheet,” says the supplementary charge-sheet.

Marks manipulated

The CBI’s investigation of files on Mohindra’s computer showed that the marks of several candidates were manipulated to help them to pass the test. While going through the hard disk seized from Mohindra, investigators found that marks of certain candidates were increased to help them qualify.

They crosschecked with OMR answer-sheets and identified 84 candidates who qualified solely due to 'grace marks'. Further investigation revealed that the accused officials and middlemen allegedly collected the roll number, form number and other details of candidates who had paid up, and passed the information to Mohindra.

Chouhan government faced intense turbulence when the STF pointed fingers at Uma Bharti and the former RSS chief K S Sudershan for having recommended an aide’s name for recruitment. Bharti characteristically raised Cain demanding a CBI probe when the state government was least prepared for it. The RSS hierarchy was also furious. To placate the two the then Director General of police Nandan Dubey had shockingly gone to the press to clear the RSS even while the STF was conducting the investigations. 

Whistleblowers cry foul

The latest charge-sheet has caused furore among those who cried foul over the government’s efforts to suppress investigation. An early whistle blower and former legislator, Paras Sakhlecha, who first raised the issue in the state Assembly in 2009, says the CBI must make all documents public. Sakhlecha had handed 240 documents to the STF pointing to the irregularities in the examinations.

RTI activist Ajay Dubey who has been pursuing the matter for many years now says the latest charge-sheet would have shown if investigations changed the course after the CBI took over from the STF. 

Information technology expert Prashant Pandey, who exposed the tinkering of excel sheets, says the columns had shown the recommendations referred to as minister-1, minister 2, minister 3 and minister 4, suggesting that there were four middlemen among ministers. The CBI seems to have made only one minister a scapegoat. “We will move the court again to raise the issues omitted by the CBI,” says Pandey.

Ashish Chaturvedi who was earlier associated with the RSS, says the CBI could only delay the inevitable. Justice might eventually prevail. But could delayed justice be any better than injustice?

Another whistleblower, Dr Anand Rai, says the CBI has opted for a cut-and-paste job taking most material from the STF documents.

HC steps in 

After criticism from within the BJP and from the opposition over the government’s clumsy effort to hush up the case by handing it to the state police the High Court had appointed a special investigation team (SIT) under former Justice Chandresh Bhushan. Justice Bhushan now refuses to be drawn into controversy regarding the clean chit given to Uma Bharti.

Regardless of whether it ‘obtains’ any convictions or not the CBI might end up offering a lot of grist to the speculation mill during the election year. 

After failing to scrub the stains of the multi-million rupee scandal, the Chouhan government renamed Vyavasayik Pariksha Mandal, the board that conducts examinations for admission to professional courses and for recruitments to various departments. The board that became a household name through its acronym, Vyapam, is now known by its English name Professional Examination Board (PEB). Ironically the Hindi name was dropped when the state was on an overdrive to paint English names into Hindi in preparation for the World Hindi Convention. The government killed the ill-famed brand Vyapam but the ghosts of scams continue to haunt it.