Tales From The Data Encrypted

Prashant Pandey, 36, was returning to Indore after attending a wedding in Mahu, 35 kilometres away, when he noticed something amiss with the headlights of the car behind him that his wife was driving. The hour was late, two in the morning on May 7. He asked his wife to switch cars and move ahead while he followed. Barely 10 minutes later and soon after they had crossed a toll bridge, a truck—empty—judging by its breakneck speed, drove past Pandey and nudged the car ahead, sending it cartwheeling over the divider. Mercifully the passengers survived with injuries and fractures.

Pandey, a digital forensics expert, has had a seminal role in exposing the Madhya Pradesh recruitment or the Vyapam scam, the stench of which reaches the doorstep of the CM, his wife and RSS leaders. It has turned Pandey’s life upside down, the latest incident rattling him enough to consider moving his family out of Indore.

“The two policemen deployed by the Madhya Pradesh police for my family’s protection had disappeared without any information a few days before the accident,” Pandey told Outlook. “When I went to the police after the accident, they refused to lodge an FIR. My plea that the CCTV footage at the toll bridge be examined to identify the truck was ignored. Instead, they threatened that a case for speeding and running over a cow (cow slaughter is a serious offence in the BJP-ruled state) would be slapped on me and my wife.”

The last one-and-a-half years have been a living hell for Pandey. First, the MP police sought him out for retrieving data from the hard disks of computers they had seized during the investigation of the Vyapam scam. Pandey had worked with the special task force (STF) for over eight months, and many of the accused were interrogated in his presence, he claims. But it was after Congress lea­der Dig­vijay Singh clai­med in a press conference that he had received Excel sheets related to the investigation from Pandey and that they indicated the involvement of chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and his wife Sadhna that Pandey was arrested from Bhopal.

He had walked out of the STF office only an hour earlier. “I was working with the policemen; the CCTV cameras and the control room there would have watched over me the entire time. They could have arrested me there, but they didn’t,” says Pandey. He knew some of the police officers who arrested him and claims that they pleaded helplessness because of the instructions from the chief minister’s office.

While he was charged with leaking official secrets in August 2014 and under different sections of the IT Act, there has been no chargesheet against him in the case till May 20, 2015. Though the intention was clearly to keep him in jail, he managed to secure bail in less than a week under fortuitous circumstances—while his lawyers were pleading for bail in one of the courts, STF officials arrived in the court next door in connection with another case. Seeing Pandey, some of them walked over and his lawyers took the opportunity to request the court to check with them about Pandey’s antecedents.

“On the first of my three nights in prison, I was put in a ward where several people accused in the Vyapam case had also been lodged,” Pandey recalls. It was an awkward time because many of them were openly hostile to him and blamed him for their plight. The next day he requested to be shifted somewhere safer and was moved to the jail hospital. “There too I was confronted with several prominent people held in connection with the Vyapam case and it was a tough task convincing them that I had played only a peripheral role in the investigation in retrieving data from computers.”

After his release from jail, he says, he reached home at 8 pm and was picked up again eight hours later, at 3.30 am. For the next 16 hours, he was  detained in the SP’s under-construction office in Bhopal. Someone in a key position, his well-wishers in the police told him, wanted him eliminated. If he was alive, it was only because the police was not sure whether he had shared sensitive information, and if so, how much of it and with whom.

Photograph by Jitender Gupta

Pandey denies he is privy to incriminating evidence but accepts that he has seen text messages, e-mail, Excel sheets, bank statements, accounts details and details of search and seizure operations conducted by the income-tax department; besides, he has also been assisting Revenue Intelligence, Enforcement Directorate etc. He believes some of the movers and shakers suspect that he is the only “outsider” who can join the dots and help investigators build up a case against them. He does blurt out that it is striking how the same set of people seemed to be involved in everything. But accuse him of leaking data to investigating agencies, and he stoutly denies it. “It requires two people for a leak,” he says, “one who holds the data and the other who receives it. For this charge to hold, they will have to identify and book both. It can’t be an arbitrary charge.”   

The fact that he is being represented by lawyers like Kapil Sibal, Indira Jaising, Vivek Tankha and K.T.S. Tulsi in the Supreme Court has led to accusations that his complaints are politically motivated and his integrity suspect. Pandey himself denies any link with any political party. “The combined fees of the lawyers representing me would run into millions of rupees and I do not have that kind of money,” he tells Outlook. “It is true that they’re working pro bono.” He was for­ced to seek their help because he did not feel safe in Madhya Pradesh any longer.

The mysterious death of several key witnesses in the case also weighed on him. Young tribal medical student Namrata Damor, who was also entangled in the scam, was found near the railway tracks, her death dismissed as suicide. Dr K. Sakalle, dean at the Jabalpur Medical College, was also said to have committed suicide by setting himself on fire in his own lawn. As whistleblower Dr Anand Rai points out, “Dr Sakalle in the forensic science department would have had access to hundreds of poisons, why would he choose such a painful death?” Sailesh, the relatively young son of Madhya Pradesh governor Ramnaresh Yadav, was found dead in Lucknow as was Vijay Singh, a pharmacist, in a lodge in Kanker in Chhattisgarh. Singh, out on bail, was in touch with his family till a few hours before he was to appear in a Bhopal court. His family members have no clue how and why he happened to be in Chhattisgarh.

That there is nervousness in the political establishment in the state is evident from how the MP government filed an FIR against former Congress chief minister Digvijay Singh for alleged irregular appointments made 22 years ago. While Chouhan has been claiming to have unearthed the Vyapam scam and to have been given a clean chit by the high court, there are still too many disturbing pieces of information flying around for his comfort.

Last week, the Supreme Court took cognisance of a petition by Pandey seeking a CBI inquiry into the rampant use of an illegal software to access data on the servers of telecom service providers without going through the due process of law.  “It was during mining the data for the police, ATS and other agencies that I finally joined the dots and learnt the software’s full potential, functions, source codes, location, data server, clients/user records, IP address, Mac address, ISPS, domain owners etc,” says Pandey. “In 2012-13, the number of registered users on the local server of the company selling the software was 4,647, of which around 3,970 were using government IP address/internet connections that mostly belonged to the MP home department, that is the police department.”

With mining baron Sudhir Sharma in jail and said to have shared close relations with both Chouhan and the prime minister, political pulls and pressures are evident. But for once politicians do not seem to be in control of events.

By K.S. Shaini in Bhopal with Uttam Sengupta in New Delhi