VYAPAM & Stew To Die For

Either Vyapam is the biggest political scandal in free India’s history—or the most ham-handed. Every day its puppeteers and perpetrators, seeking to stem its stench, find a new victim to snuff out of existence. A TV journalist one day; a college dean the next. Forty-eight people have perished so far, 23 of them in mysterious circumstances. But as ‘caged parrot’ CBI swoops in on the Supreme Court’s orders to get to the bottom of it, the question is how deep it will really be allowed to dig in the BJP-ruled state when the letters R-S-S stare at it.

The connection dates back to 1990, when Sudhir Sharma started his career as a teacher in the RSS-run Saraswati Shishu Mandir. His father Babulal Sha­rma, a clerk in the dairy corporation, sold milk in the evenings to make ends meet. Today, however, Sharma is estimated to be worth over Rs 20,000 crore; his empire straddling mining, education and media, among other interests. His meteoric rise is traced to his decision to resign from a technology university in 2003 to become officer on special duty to Laxmikant Sharma when he bec­ame minister for mining and higher education.

As Sudhir Sharma minted money, he didn’t forget senior RSS and BJP leaders, it now turns out. In fact, the amount of money became so unmanageable that his staff had to start keeping a record of the payments made to various people and why. Names of RSS seniors like Suresh Soni, Prabhat Jha and BJP MP Anil Dave surfaced in the records as it became clear that Sharma was paying for their train and flight fare, board and lodging.

While Laxmikant played mentor to Sudhir, ‘mantriji’ himself was identified as Soni’s protege. The latter’s name is said to have cropped up during the interrogation of two accused. O.P. Shukla, OSD to Laxmikant during the scam, admitted to the Special Task Force about receiving letters of recommendation from former RSS chief, the late K.S. Sudarshan, and Soni for a Mihir Kumar. Kumar in his sta­tement said, “Sud­arshanji phoned (Laxmikant) Sharma and the latter assured it would done. Sudarshan then asked me to fill up the answers in the optical mark reader sheet to the ext­ent I was sure and leave the rest blank.” Once their names began doing the rou­nds, Soni issued a statement from Nagpur alleging a political conspiracy. While he gave no details or names, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan issued a press release giving RSS seniors a clean chit.

A section of the RSS itself, however, says that the organisation was dragged into the controversy to deflect attention from the involvement of the chief minister and his wife. “It was not a mere coincidence that the name of the chief minister’s wife Sadhna Singh dis­appeared from the media,” says an RSS leader eni­gmatically. Digvijay Singh had fired the first salvo in November 2014 linking the CM’s wife to the scam. The Congress leader had demanded that Sadhna Singh’s call details be checked because of the innumerable calls she had allegedly made to Vyapam officials. But the controller of examinati­ons at Vya­pam, Pankaj Trivedi, is said to have implicated two senior RSS leaders immediately after the Opposition claimed that 19 candida­tes hailing from Gondia, home town of the CM’s wife, were sel­ected as transport constables in an exam conducted by Vyapam. Not surprisingly, Congress lea­ders like Sathyadev Katare, also the lea­der of the Opposition, too endorse Trivedi’s claim. “They called it their dream project. They made MP the nursery to plant RSS workers and train them,” Katare claimed.

There is also growing resentment in the state over what people have started cal­ling the ‘terror of the STF’. It is accused of arresting students and their parents (over 1,900 people accused in the scam are in jail, most of them students and guardians) and detaining many more indefinitely without charging them formally or producing them before court as required by law. The students, legal exp­erts feel, should have been made prosecution witnesses and not the accused. Stu­dents and youth in the state are depressed and scared. “Young people are dying under mysterious circumstances. Stu­dents are hiding at home, scared to come out and speak,” claims Katare. Media reports of as many as 48 ‘mysterious deaths’ have merely added to the panic among people. One of the accused who is out on bail after being in jail for 11 months appears terror-stricken and claims there is a threat to his life. “I don’t go out. I don’t go to office. In jail, unknown people would visit and threaten me with serious consequences if we opened our mouths before the police or in court,” one of them told Outlook. Even family members of Vyapam system analyst and the alleged mastermind behind the scam, Nitin Mahendra, claim to have received threatening calls, another accused reveals, on condition of anonymity. “The police humiliate, ill-treat and bla­ckmail the accused in jail for money. For eve­ry­thing they extract money,” he says. “We are safe neither inside jail or outside it.”

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A Funny Money Trail

Pages from a report compiled by the income-tax department show payments made by mining baron Sudhir Sharma to RSS leaders

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There are unconfirmed reports of STF personnel blackmailing people, extorting money to either keep them out of jail or to leave them out of the inquiry. There seems to be some truth in the allegation, going by the experience of some of them. Vijay Tripathi, an acc­used in the scam, was in jail for six months. He secu­red bail from the cou­rts on April 14, 2015. But he received a notice from the STF under a different section on April 25 and was sent back to jail. The arrest of Vyapam officials was followed by the arrest of middlemen, examination ‘sol­vers’ or writers, examiners and tabulators, poli­ticians, policemen and students. The latter have now started applying for anticipatory bail. But most people in jail have been denied bail. Many accused are languishing for two years without trial or bail. A leading doctor could not get temporary bail even for his son’s marriage. The STF’s list of accused is endless, confounding things further. Ref­erring to the large number of MBBS students in jail, several police officers and lawyers feel it would have been a lot better to serve them notices with ins­tructions to appear in court during the trial, with the stipulation that if convi­cted, their admission would be cancelled.

Some text messages circulating in Bhopal hint at the extent of money and the people involved. For example, during an I-T raid on Sudhir Sharma in Bhopal, the following smses were retrieved from his seized iPhone 4:

“Have u recd 5 kg goods?”

“Thanks bhaiya, I received total 17.5 kg till today”

“5 kg give to Laxmikantji. Tomorrow I will send...”

The department concluded ‘kg’ in the smses to be code for “lakhs of rupees”. Not only was Sudhir Sharma, in jail since July 2014, paying various people, including mentor Laxmikant, entries showed Sudhir himself receiving cash. S. Agarwal, one of the most frequent donors, was suspected to be Sanjeev Agarwal who ran the Sagar Group of Educational Institutions. Another frequent donor—‘Sunil Dadhir’—was actually believed to be Sunil ‘Dandir’ of the Truba Group of Edu­cational Institutions. Much of this cash was being immediately handed over to one Mohar Singh, on Laxmikant’s personal staff. The I-T department found that Agarwal handed over Rs 15 lakh in cash on January 10, 2012, to Sudhir; the amo­unt was handed over to Mohar Singh the same day. Similarly two months later, on March 7, Agarwal paid a similar amount which was handed over to Singh.

Photograph by Jitender Gupta

Fodder for controversy  A deleted sheet allegedly retrieved from a Vyapam hard disk shows names, roll nos. and presumably people who recommended their case for admission or recruitment

Why would someone running an educational institution make regular cash payments to Sudhir Sharma? And who was the ultimate beneficiary? Offi­cials in the I-T department rem­ain tight-lipped but indicate that the inquiry has not moved since 2012. A major component of ‘expen­ses’ Sudhir Sha­rma clai­med—Rs 5.57 crore to be precise—pertained to “payment of illegal gratification mostly in cash”, a departmental report held.

Copies of official-looking documents circulating in Bhopal and New Delhi seem to implicate Union minister Uma Bharati as well. Her name is listed in 17 places in one of the Excel sheets, for allegedly recommending people to Vyapam, though it is not known whether it was for admission or recruitment (see document). But the list does carry names and roll numbers and it should not be too difficult for the STF to track them down.

However, when they first investigated the hard disk of Vyapam system analyst Nitin Mahendra, the STF found crucial data missing. When sent to a government for­ensic lab in Gandhinagar, the data from the hard disk is claimed to have implicated Bharati. She is said to have referred several candidates to education minister Laxmikant or his OSD Shu­kla (both behind bars now). The STF notice to Bharati received a bland one-para response, flatly denying the charges. Then DGP Nandan Dubey went to great lengths, even meeting the minister at her Bhopal residence and later telling journalists that she was innocent.

Candlelight vigil for journalist Akshay Singh investigating the scam. (Photograph by Sanjay Rawat)

The extent of the Vyapam rot is only now emerging. Since 2009, Vyapam has organised 81 examinations for recruitment to non-gazetted posts in the state government. It claims to have recruited 4,00,000 out of the 10 million applicants. The organisation charged a fee for conducting the recruitment tests and has collected Rs 124 crore in the last six years. The fees were hiked and Vyapam made a killing in 2012 by raking in Rs 83 crore during the year. The results, however, were fixed and the seats in colleges and the jobs went to people who paid up. A sum of Rs 4-10 lakh was demanded for the post of a Grade-II officer, while the rates for Grade III and Grade IV posts were Rs 1.25 lakh and Rs 50,000 respectively, some of the accused confide. Similarly the price of securing admission in professional colleges was also fixed. While the rate for admission in a medical college was Rs 10-15 lakh, admission to veterinary science courses cost Rs 3 lakh. For a post-graduate medical course, the rate started from Rs 75 lakh. Earlier recruitments were done by government departments. Appointments of constables and sub-inspectors were done at the level of the SP and IG. And contractual teachers in chools were appointed by jan panchayats. But the mushrooming of private medical, engineering and professional colleges and centralised recruitment and admission led to the snowballing of the scam.

Worse, RSS and BJP leaders who do not tire of recounting the virtues of ‘good governance’ changed policies and rules at whim. The criterion that an MP domi­cile certificate be provided was waived. As were the criteria for physical attribu­tes like hei­ght, weight, etc, as also fitness and speed. The minimum height for recruitment as sub-inspectors was dropped.

Retired IAS officer Satya Prakash blames the government for centralising the process without creating the structures and checks and balances required. It was either poorly thought out or too well thought out, he obs­erves wryly. Prakash claims to have been told by one of the accused that he received a direct threat that 40 more cases would be lodged agai­nst him if he dared to speak out against BJP and RSS lea­ders. A police officer also told Outlook on condition of anonymity that the attempt so far had been to shield the ‘high and mighty’, “the first citizen, the first lady and the RSS”. Why else would members of the STF start writing to the director general (police) seeking security and complaining of threats to their lives, he asks. The investi­gation is acknowledged to have been derailed. And it is doubtful if a probe by the CBI can nail the masterminds. The BJP has said the Excel sheets were tampe­red with. But no probe has so far been conducted to find out who deleted data from the hard disk. The STF has not bothered to lodge an FIR against Congress leader Digvijay Singh for allegedly submitting forged Excel sheets. Prashant Pandey, who retrieved data from the Vyapam computers, says the computer hard disks were neither sealed nor seized for forensic examination. In other words, prosecutable evidence may be found to be thin when the CBI finally gets into the act.

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