Vyapam Scam: CBI Gives Clean to Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on October 31 filed a charge sheet against 490 people in the multi-crore scam of the Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal or ‘Vyapam’ in Madhya Pradesh, but gave a clean chit to Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

The Vyapam scam is one of the biggest admission-cum-recruitment scams in India, which ran from 2008 to 2013 with nearly 2,000 accused persons.

Submitting the charge sheet in the Special Court in Bhopal, the CBI told the judge that there was no tampering with a hard disk seized by the Madhya Pradesh police in the case, as the agency dismissed an allegation by senior Congress leader and former CM Digvijaya Singh in this regard.

The former CM was at the forefront of the campaign for a thorough investigation into the scam, which involved politically high profile names.

The whistleblower in the case, Prashant Pandey, and Digvijaya Singh had alleged that the files that were seized by the state police from Nitin Mohindra, an accused official of the MP Professional Examination Board, had contained the word ‘CM’, but that the hard disk was tampered with later.

The word ‘CM’ was mentioned 48 times in an excel file stored on the disk and was replaced or deleted, Singh and Pandey had said in separate pleas.

Earlier, in an interview with senior journalist Sunil Gatade, Digvijaya Singh questioned the involvement of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who was the CM then as well.

“Those who paid money to get admissions have gone to jail, lost money and lost their seats in medical colleges. But what about people who have taken the money and cheated them? Why they have not been arrested? Can all this happen under the nose of the chief minister [Shivraj Singh Chouhan] without his knowledge?” Digvijaya Singh had asked.

“The minister responsible, Lakshmikant Sharma, is an accused and had gone to jail. Why has no action been taken against the CM and his officers in the CMO?”

Lakshmikant Sharma, the former education minister of Madhya Pradesh, is an accused and was in jail for nearly two years. The former governor of Madhya Pradesh, Ram Naresh Yadav, had made headlines after the Special Task Force, which was probing the scam, lodged an FIR against him on February 24, 2016, in connection with the Forest Guard Recruitment, 2014. But the FIR was quashed by the High Court, mentioning that he enjoyed immunity while in office. Yadav’s demise on November 22, 2016, had closed another chapter of the case.

The BJP, however, was always loyal to Ram. While a long list of governors were shifted and sacked by the Narendra Modi government, Yadav sustained himself in MP.

Those named in the CBI charge sheet include three Vyapam officials, three racketeers, 17 middlemen, 297 paper solvers and beneficiary candidates, and 170 guardians of beneficiary candidates. Most of the accused were operating from state capital Bhopal, Indore, Ujjain, Shahdol, Ratlam, and Sagar in Madhya Pradesh. The charge sheet against another 12 accused persons will be filed in juvenile courts.

The CBI collected pertinent details of students of various medical colleges and coaching institutes spread all over the state and prepared a database of more than 10 lakh such students.

“With the help of advanced forensic software and said database, the CBI was able to identify and trace 42 accused solver candidates. Using other innovative methods, the CBI was able to trace 11 middlemen and made them join the investigation,” the CBI charge sheet said.

The CBI took over investigation following the Supreme Court order on July 9, 2015. The charge sheet was connected to the Pre-Medical Test of 2013, one of the several cases of irregularities in examinations conducted by Vyapam.

CBI investigators said the organised rackets employed students from across the country to allegedly impersonate medical students and appear in recruitment exams since 2008. Middlemen manipulated seating arrangements and forged answer sheets in exchange for lakhs of rupees.

The arrest of 20 people in Indore blew the lid off the massive scam, which quickly snowballed into the biggest political crisis for Chouhan and led to more than 2,000 arrests, including those of politicians, bureaucrats, and middlemen.

Over 40 persons, including witnesses, accused, and alleged beneficiaries, died in mysterious circumstances ever since the scam broke out. These included a son of the then Governor. Some died in freak accidents or of mysterious illnesses.

Opposition Congress has repeatedly raised concern over the mode of investigation and chances of manipulation in the case under the influence of politicians, given that some high-profile names were involved.

In the wake of CBI’s charge sheet, senior lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan blasted the selective investigation of CBI.

“CBI gives 'clean chit' to Shivraj in Vyapam scam. Doesn't charge sheet Controller of exams where massive manipulation is found. Caged parrot!”, Prashant Bhushan tweeted.

(With inputs from IANS.)