Saturday, July 25, 2015

As CBI investigates Vyapam scam, the spotlight grows on another Chouhan family member

RECRUITMENT SCAM

The Congress has accused Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Chouhan's wife Sadhna Singh of malfeasance in several cases, including Vyapam.

Photo Credit: IANS
It’s widely known in Madhya Pradesh that Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan doesn’t take kindly to allegations against his wife Sadhna Singh. Whenever the opposition accused her of malfeasance in the past, Chouhan replied with appeals for observing the sanctity of the family, charges of “hitting below the belt”, and on occasions defamation suits. This time, none of those responses may work.

After taking over the probe into the Vyapam, or cash-for-jobs, scandal from the state’s Special Task Force, the Central Bureau of Investigation has reopened the case of Premlata Pandey’s death. The main opposition here, the Congress, claims there are strands connecting Pandey and Sadhna Singh.

Premlata Pandey, who hailed from the Beohari tehsil in Shahdol district, allegedly died of liver cancer in 2013 and the state-level probe saw nothing fishy in it. She and her sister-in-law Sandhya Pandey, both in their early thirties, had cleared the rigged contract teacher’s test in 2012, which was conducted by the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board, popularly known by its Hindi acronym Vyapam. Their candidatures were cancelled later as allegations surfaced of gross malpractice in the 2012 examination.

In February this year, senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh released details of a text message he said was sent by Sadhna Singh recommending Premlata Pandey and Sandhya Pandey for selection as teachers. The Congress general secretary claimed that one Rakesh Pandey had forwarded the names of his sister-in-law (Premlata) and her sister (Sandhya) to Sadhna Singh on the phone number registered in the chief minister’s wife’s maiden name, Kokila Singh.

The SMS was sent on May 9, 2012, he claimed, and soon after the mobile connection was discontinued. The Congress leader maintained that Sadhna Singh forwarded the request to Sudhir Sharma, a powerful mining baron who is now in jail for his alleged role in the Vyapam scandal.

“My contention is that all the others mentioned in the link are in jail, while one particular person [Sadhna] was not even questioned. Why is that?” Digvijaya Singh was quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times.

State government spokesman and principal secretary to the chief minister SK Mishra denied the Congress allegation. Mishra claimed that Rakesh Pandey had sent the SMS to two persons – Recipient 1: Sadhna Singh and Recipient 2: Sudhir Sharma – and that it was not a chain SMS (Pandey to Singh to Sharma), according to the Hindustan Times report.

Still, there is a chance that the CBI may question Sadhna Singh in connection with Premlata Pandey’s death.

Her troubles could grow further if the Supreme Court orders a CBI probe into the Dental and Medical Admission Test scam, as sought in a joint petition by three whistleblowers of the Vyapam scam. The petitioners have alleged that Sadhna Singh’s niece (younger sister’s daughter) got admission in Chirayu Medical College in Bhopal in 2012 through the rigged DMAT. Other beneficiaries include sons and daughters of BJP and Congress politicians, bureaucrats, judges and businessmen.

The petitioners have contended that the test conducted by the association of owners of the state’s six private medical and 16 dental colleges is a sham. While hearing their petition on July 16, the Supreme Court remarked that the DMAT scam was worse than Vyapam. It will pronounce a verdict on the petition after hearing the replies of the state and union governments, which have been served notices.

Spotlight on older accusations

The allegations against the chief minister’s wife in the twin scams have brought into sharper focus the older charges against her. Before Chouhan became chief minister in 2005, not much was known about his wife of 13 years. Her public participation was limited to appearances at mass marriage functions that Shivraj Singh organised in Vidisha while he was Member of Parliament from the constituency from 1991 to 2005.

With Chouhan’s ascent to the chief minister’s post, Sadhna Singh’s profile also grew. She vigorously campaigned in the 2006 assembly by-election in Budni for her husband. Her deep interest in Chouhan’s poll campaign triggered speculation that she would be picked as the BJP candidate from the Vidisha Lok Sabha seat vacated by her husband. But the BJP high-command nixed the idea. Nevertheless, Sadhna Singh remained an active BJP worker in the party’s woman wing.

In the 2009 Lok Sabha election too, speculation was rife that Sadhna Singh might be the BJP candidate from the Hoshangabad seat. “Inner-party surveys” by BJP workers overwhelmingly favoured her over all other candidates, and neither Chouhan nor Sadhna denied prospects of the candidacy. Again, however, the BJP high-command denied Sadhna Singh a ticket.

All this while, there were whispers of her involvement in administrative matters in the chief minister’s secretariat. These whispers turned louder in 2007, when a former Bharatiya Janata Party leader, Prahlad Patel, alleged that Sadhna Singh purchased four dumpers worth Rs 2 crore and leased them to a Rewa-based cement factory. Since the factory owner was a friend of the chief minister, there were allegations of quid pro quo.

Chouhan confirmed his wife’s deal with the company but denied there was any dishonest dealing. Not convinced, the Congress moved court, which gave a clean chit to the Chouhan couple. The Lokayukta too dismissed the Congress’ complaint of corruption against the couple four years later.

The uproar over the dumper case was yet to die when the Congress accused Sadhna Singh of undervaluing a warehouse she owned. This allegation too was dismissed by Chouhan with the argument that the chief minister’s wife has as much a right as anyone else to do business to support her family. Chouhan pulled out the same card every time accusations were hurled at Sadhna Singh, whether of helping builder Dilip Suryavanshi get road contracts or of taking undue interest in mining contracts or of patronising select bureaucrats in transfer postings.

Not surprisingly, in the run-up to the 2013 assembly election, the Congress targeted Sadhna Singh as aggressively as Shivraj Chouhan. The then leader of opposition, Ajay Singh, alleged she had to buy a currency counting machine to count her ill-gotten money. An infuriated Shivraj responded by slapping a defamation notice on the Congress leader for Rs 1 crore. When an undeterred Congress showed the Chouhan couple with such a machine in an election poster, the chief minister slapped another defamation notice of Rs 10 crore, this time against Congress president Sonia Gandhi. These cases are pending in courts.

'Super chief minister'

The chief minister’s election affidavit submitted before the 2013 assembly polls shows Sadhna Singh’s income rose over five years by 140% and Chouhan’s by 64%. They jointly own immovable and movable properties worth Rs 6.26 crore, out of which Chouhan’s share is Rs 2.4 crore and his wife’s Rs 3.8 crore. Sadhna Singh owns a warehouse, three greenhouses and a poly house in Vidisha district.

Her bank balance was Rs 1.8 lakh in 2008 and Rs 8.6 lakh in 2013. On the other hand, Chouhan’s account held Rs 10.5 lakh at the time of the 2008 elections and just Rs 1 lakh more before the 2013 polls. As per the chief minister’s affidavit in 2013, the net worth of his immovable assets was Rs 44.32 lakh, while his wife’s net worth was Rs 24.71 lakh

In 2014, the Congress spokesman in Madhya Pradesh, KK Mishra, became the latest figure in the long tally of grand old party members slapped with defamation suits. Unlike others, he was sued by the state government, not the chief minister.

Mishra invited the defamation notice for alleging that 17 candidates got through the Vyapam-conducted transport constable recruitment test of 2012 by forging documents and that they were all from Sadhna Singh’s home district of Gondia in Maharashtra.

While the original notification was to recruit 198 candidates, Vyapam went ahead and recruited 332, he claimed. In the wake of the allegations, a police probe ensued, which resulted in the cancellation of the recruitment of 39 candidates, including 17 allegedly from Gondia.

Despite the defamation suit, KK Mishra is undaunted. “This is known to everyone in the BJP, the bureaucracy and everywhere, that Sadhna Singh has been acting like super chief minister in the state,” he alleged. “You can ask BJP leaders and they would give you better details of her influence on the working of the Chouhan cabinet.”
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Monday, July 20, 2015

Government Turns on Whistleblower Anand Rai as Vyapam, DMAT Probe Gathers Pace


BY  ON 21/07/2015 • ( LEAVE A COMMENT )

First, his wife was suspended from her government job for having availed child-care leave; now the doctor who helped pull the plug on Vyapam is being transferred to another town

anand rai
Dr Anand Rai, one of the whistleblowers who helped bring the Vyapam scam to light. Credit: Facebook page
BHOPAL: A whistleblower for a decade now, Dr Anand Rai has learnt to keep his chin up in the face of pressure and intimidation from the white-collar criminals he has sought to expose. The Indore-based medical officer has received innumerable threats over the years and lives today under police protection provided to him by the Madhya Pradesh government on the High Court’s orders.
Today, though, the crusader is finally worried – not so much for himself as for his doctor-wife and their two-and-half-year-old daughter. On July 19, the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government transferred Rai – the first whistleblower in the Vyapam scam -from Indore to Dhar, further west in the Malwa plateau. Two weeks ago, his wife, a gynaecologist, was shifted from Mhow, a suburb of Indore, to Ujjain.
The health department issued a transfer order on a holiday, cancelling Rai’s attachment in the regional health and welfare training centre, Indore. Four years ago, he was posted as medical officer in Dhar district hospital but, soon after the posting, the department acceded to his request to attach him to the Indore training centre so that he could be with his wife Gauri Rai.
“Now in the middle of training at the centre, I am being shifted back to Dhar,” shrugs Rai, who blew the first whistle in July 2013 in the Vyapam scam that involves dubious medical admissions and job recruitments involving politicians, senior officials and businessmen. “The health department says I am not the only doctor whose attachment has been cancelled. This is a lie.”
He says the way he has been “singled out for harassment” in the name of transfer “clearly reeks” of the Chouhan government’s “vicious vendetta”.
According to Rai, the Chief Minister “specifically instructed” health secretary Gauri Singh to issue his transfer order before leaving for Delhi on Sunday (July 19) afternoon”. Vowing to fight against the action, he says, “I am not going to take it lying down. I will move the High Court against the order.”
Rai says he had a foretaste of trouble coming his way in the veiled threats of BJP spokespersons during TV debates on Vyapam recently.
“My co-panellists Sambit Patra and GVL Narasimha Rao (both from the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party) would subtly threaten me. One of them would accuse me of being a murderer. Another would angrily ask how I, a government doctor, dared to embarrass the establishment on the issue,” he recalls. “These were open and direct threats. Of course, there have been lots of indirect threats to me to keep my mouth shut ever since I blew the whistle over Vyapam.”
The scam gained its name from the Hindi acronym for the Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal – a Madhya Pradesh government-incorporated, self-financed and autonomous body tasked with conducting several entrance tests in the state.
Wife penalised 
The transfer is the second blow for Rai in a fortnight.  In the first week of this month, the health department suspended his wife, who was posted as a doctor in Mhow hospital, for having availed child-care leave. When she threatened to move the court against the action, the government quickly revoked her suspension, but transferred her to Ujjain.
“Now we are worried about our toddler daughter,” says Rai. “I fail to understand why the government is punishing my wife and child for my boldness in exposing the rot in the medical education. What is the government trying to prove by transferring me?”
Rai says he knew life was not going to be easy for him when, in 2005, he first exposed unethical clinical drug trials by unscrupulous doctors of Indore’s Mahatma Gandhi memorial medical college. He was all alone in the fight against a powerful lobby of medical experts who had no qualms in treating poor, gullible patients as guinea pigs on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. Predictably, they ganged up against Rai.
“They (the doctor’s lobby) would threaten me — sometimes subtly, sometimes directly,” he recalls. “Initially I was scared, but, by and by, I learned to live with threats.”
Today, Rai anticipates more trouble as the Supreme Court is seized of a joint petition seeking a CBI probe into the rigging of the Dental and Medical Admission Test (DMAT) for 1,500 admissions in the state’s six private medical and 16 private dental colleges. The state’s medical and dental college owners comprise a far more powerful lobby than the doctors involved in the drug trials.
Rai, who is one of the three petitioners, claims the DMAT scam involves transactions worth more than Rs 10,000 crore since the test began in 2006. Going by scale, it is bigger than the Vyapam, which has led to 2,000 arrests amid the ‘mysterious’ deaths of 40-odd people ‘related’ to the multi-crore rip-off. On July 16, the Supreme Court issued notices to the Union government and the Madhya Pradesh government on the whistleblowers’ petition. While hearing the petition, the apex court said the DMAT scam “seems worse” than the Vyapam.
“There is a clear link between the corruption in Vyapam and DMAT,” says Rai. “The same solvers who would impersonate for candidates in Vyapam also filled in seats in private colleges, but later surrendered the seats which were then sold.”
If the DMAT scam also comes under the purview of the CBI probe into Vyapam, the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government’s troubles are sure to mount. The tenacity with which the whistleblowers are pursuing the DMAT case after having succeeded in bringing the Vyapam scam under a CBI probe has further rattled the embattled state government. The transfers of Rai and his wife are being viewed as a desperate move to gag the whistleblowers.
Years of living dangerously
Rai, however, is unfazed. “If the government thinks it can browbeat me into silence, it is sorely mistaken. My fight against the corrupt medical education system in Madhya Pradesh is not new,” he says, recalling that he had raised an alarm about irregularities in medical education way back in 1993 when the zoology paper he attempted in the Pre-Medical Test was leaked in Gwalior. “My subsequent involvement in student politics and participation in exposing graft cases prepared me to face threats and harassments with courage.”
Ironically, Rai has been associated with the rightwing Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) since 2005. He was an office-bearer of the Sangh-affiliated doctor’s cell. But he feels let down by the Hindutva organisation.
“If the Sangh can stand up for (terror-accused) Pragya Singh Thakur who has brought public disgrace to the organisation, then why did it abandon me when I was exposing Vyapam,” he asks.
After he blew the lid off Vyapam, the RSS not only disowned him but withheld the 2012-13 Nanaji Deshmukh award for social service, named after the RSS ideologue, for which Rai was recommended. “The RSS claims to fight for corruption, but till now has (its chief) Mohan Bhagwat said a word on Vyapam?” Rai asks.
Incidentally, the RSS ‘renegade’ found a useful weapon for his fight against corruption in the Congress party’s pet project, the Right To Information (RTI) Act. He has filed more than 1,000 RTI applications, including those concerning the mess in drug trials to expose corruption in the state’s medical education sector.
Rai says he had sensed the rot in the medical education in 2005 when he was pursuing post-graduation in the MGM College, Indore. He discovered that the students who figured among the top ten in the entrance exam hardly had any knowledge of the subject. All of them were from affluent families and lived in a common block of the college hostel. However, he thought he was too junior to expose the PMT rigging at that time and, therefore, kept quiet. Four years later, he could not keep quiet when he learnt that some PMT papers were about to be leaked.
“I immediately tipped off the Indore crime branch. A case was registered. Later, I filed complaints in similar cases involving impersonators from other states who appeared in the pre medical test on behalf of candidates. Since then my fight has continued.”
When Rai exposed the unethical drug trials that were going on in the state, his campaign created a stir across Madhya Pradesh and even in the national media. However, far from taking action against the unscrupulous medical experts involved in the clinical trials, the state government apparently sought to shield them.
Rai mounted pressure on the government for action by disclosing more and more shocking facts related to the trials. The RTI route came handy in the fight. Eventually, Supreme Court intervention forced the Union Health Ministry and the Madhya Pradesh government to take remedial measures.
Stung by his expose, the state government terminated Rai’s services in August 2010. He was then a junior doctor attached to the Maharaja Yashvant Rao hospital of the MGM Medical College, Indore.
A strike by the Madhya Pradesh Junior Doctors Association was used as a “ruse” for his termination, says Rai, who was one of the patrons of the body whose other functionaries were suspended for striking work. Their suspension was revoked after a while, but Rai’s termination stayed.
At this, he moved the Indore bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. The court in November 2010 quashed the termination order, asking the government to reinstate him immediately. The government ignored the verdict, following which Rai moved a contempt petition. The court slapped a fine of Rs 5,000 for contempt of court. Even so, the government did not reinstate him.
Then, in 2011, Rai cleared the Madhya Pradesh Public Service Commission test and became a medical officer. He was posted to Dhar but was later attached to a training centre in Indore.
The state government seems to have realised it was a mistake allowing Dr  Anand Rai to stay in Indore
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How Digvijay Singh lost Madhya Pradesh but is plotting his way back


HOMING IN

More than a decade since he was chief minister, the Congress leader has found in the Vyapam scam the perfect vehicle to try and wrest control of the fractious state party unit.

Photo Credit: IANS
Given the complexity of the Vyapam, or cash-for-jobs, scandal, the Central Bureau of Investigation’s probe into the relevant cases is likely to continue beyond 2018, the year when an assembly election in Madhya Pradesh is due. Whether the Congress can galvanise its workers to oust the scam-scalded ruling Bharatiya Janata Party hinges on three factors.

First, who, if anyone, will emerge as the party’s most acceptable leader in the state? Second, will more skeletons tumble out of the state government's cupboard? Three, will the Modi government at the Centre deliver on promises it has made?

For now, Congress workers appear to be rallying behind party general secretary Digvijay Singh. But the two-time chief minister maintains that he is no longer interested in a post that he had held for a decade until 2003. “I am now in national politics. Why should I opt for leadership in state?" he said.

Most state Congress leaders are sceptical of his statement. They contend that it was not for nothing that Singh invested so much time and energy to get the Supreme Court to initiate a CBI probe into the scam. “Is he after Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s scalp only to avenge his humiliating defeat 12 years ago?” asked a senior Congress leader rhetorically, adding, “It looks most unlikely.”

Singh’s march with Congress workers in Bhopal on July 16, when the party had called for a bandh in the state over the Vyapam scam, betrays his ambition, said some senior colleagues.

The government’s efforts to thwart the bandh succeeded to a great extent, with life continuing more or less as usual. Yet the Congress sounded jubilant, while the ruling party never looked more nervous.

Singh’s government fell because of accusations of corruption, so one can detect in Singh’s acerbic comments a sense of glee at the predicament of his bête noire, who is in his third term. “The Chouhan government organises official functions for kanya daan for marriageable girls, now he should also launch a scheme for pind daan of youths in the state,” Singh recently tweeted, referring to a Hindu rite for wishing peace for the soul of someone who has died. The morbid comment was a reference to nationwide outrage over Vyapam-related deaths, whose official count is 32, but could be as high as 46.

Leaving home

Going by the past, Singh cannot to be taken at his word about his political plans. Observers were tempted to write his political obituary when he announced in the aftermath of the poll defeat that he would stay off electoral politics for 10 years. Yet he retained the Raghogarh assembly seat for the next five years and accepted the Congress general secretary post in 2004, provoking sarcastic remarks about his earlier pledge.

But if, belying his public statements, he were to come back to state politics, he will find that his base in Madhya Pradesh has severely eroded, even though he may have found a place in national politics. His demoralised supporters started deserting him after the party high command nominated the late Subhash Yadav to the post of Madhya Pradesh party chief following the poll debacle. During Yadav’s tenure, Digvijay Singh would only occasionally come from New Delhi to Bhopal, meet his supporters and attend assembly sessions. His engagement with the state did not increase after Suresh Pachouri succeeded Yadav in 2007.

Three years later, Singh’s supporters hoped their fortunes would turn in the state Congress, when Kantilal Bhuria replaced Pachouri and Ajay Singh succeeded the late Jamuna Devi as leader of opposition. Both Bhuria, a former minister in the UPA government at the centre, and Ajay Singh, son of the late Congress leader Arjun Singh, are known Digvijay Singh supporters. But the twin changes did little to resuscitate the moribund Congress. His protégés, Ajay Singh and Bhuria, performed dismally and further alienated Digvijay Singh from state Congress workers.

Singh’s disengagement with the state looked near complete when the high command gave Jyotiraditya Scindia the job of leading the party back to power in the 2013 assembly election. It is an open secret that Scindia and Singh don’t get along. The third successive Congress defeat, in that election, forced Scindia to end his brief dalliance with the state unit and Singh to further curtail his visits to Bhopal.

The defeat triggered yet another change of guard. Arun Yadav, son of the late Subhash Yadav and a former union minister, succeeded Bhuria as state Congress president. Satya Deo Katare took over as leader of opposition from Ajay Singh. Neither Arun Yadav nor Katare is considered to be in Singh’s camp.

Returning home

But in early 2014, Singh decided to reconsolidate his base in the state Congress. By then, the cash-for-jobs scam had begun to snowball into a huge corruption scandal, with a spate of arrests. Singh chose to ride the scam as a comeback vehicle. His demands for a CBI probe into the scam became louder and more frequent. Before long, he had almost wrested the Congress initiative to embarrass Chouhan's government.

In November, Singh moved the Madhya Pradesh high court to seek a CBI probe into the scam. But the court rejected his plea and instead ordered the government to set up a special investigation team to supervise the probe already being conducted by a special task force. Singh moved the Supreme Court against the decision, only to be disappointed.

On February 16, Singh addressed a joint press conference with top lawyers and senior party leaders such as Kamal Nath and Jyotirditya Scindia. They alleged that the chief minister was directly involved in the scam, which he denies. Singh submitted what he said was incontrovertible documentary evidence to the special investigation team chairman, justice Chandresh Bhushan. The high court, however, rejected his proof, saying it was forged.

But emboldened by the media’s ample coverage of the mysterious deaths related to the scam, Singh again moved the Supreme Court for a CBI probe, finally succeeding on July 9, and advancing in his long-drawn legal and political battles against Chouhan.
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Thursday, July 16, 2015

Skating on Thin Ice

Skating on Thin Ice


5
Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister faces imminent threat to his seat as Vyapam toll count grows and discomfort in the BJP grows
By Rakesh Dixit
Go to top
Becoming Madhya Pra-desh’s longest serving chief minister has been Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s long cherished goal. But will his dream run end as yet another case of coming so close yet being so far? Right now, Chouhan is just four months short of surpassing his predecessor Digvijaya Singh’s 10 year record as CM. But the raging fire of the Vyapam admissions and appointments scam threatens to singe Chouhan’s grand ambitions. From a confident and proud CEO of his state, he has become a veritable political wreck. And questions are being asked in Delhi, and that too within his own party, the BJP, about whether he will survive this agnipariksha.
The scam hit the national headlines at a time when the BJP is battling an onslaught of corruption charges that has already corroded the clean image of the Modi government. But the Vyapam scam is unlike the allegations of impropriety leveled at external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje. For a start there is no Lalit Modi to blame for leveling wild charges. Much of the facts that have become public are based on police investigations, court observations and government record. The scam involves thousands of victims, hundreds of crores of rupees and comes crucially with the stench of death. The list of those linked to the scam, who have died under mysterious circumstances, seems to be growing by the day and BJP spokespersons have been having a tough time defending the indefensible. If sources in the BJP are to be believed, there is a big question mark on how long the party will rally around Chouhan. Or will it leave the Madhya Pradesh chief minister to his devices and let him handle the crisis on his own?
TRAIL OF DEAD
The big blow for Chouhan came on July 9 when the Supreme Court ordered a CBI probe into the multi-crore admissions and recruitment scam. The court order followed an unprecedented nationwide outrage over mysterious deaths of over 40 accused and witnesses related to the multi-layered swindle that has caused over 2,000 arrests, including those of politicians, bureaucrats, job racketeers, middlemen and businessmen, apart from a large number of medical students and their parents. Nearly 500 suspects are still absconding while 55 chargesheets have been filed in the state’s 22 courts against the beneficiaries of gross subversion of pre-medical and recruitment tests conducted by the Madhya Pradesh professional examination board since 2008.
Although the scam had snowballed into a mega corruption scandal, a crafty Shivraj Singh Chouhan managed to keep his chin up. His refrain that the Special Task Force (STF) of the state police was doing a fine job under the supervision of the Madhya Pradesh High Court may have evoked sharp protests from the Congress. But people in Madhya Pradesh had been largely insouciant. After all, corruption in medical college admissions and government jobs is acknowledged as a given in this part of the world. It is only after the relentless reports about the spate of ‘unnatural deaths’ hit the national media that trouble for Chouhan began mounting.
The most troubling of them all was the death of Akshay Singh, a TV journalist on July 4. Although the real cause of the scribe’s death is yet to be ascertained, a shaken Shivraj did everything he could to ensure that his reputation did not suffer. He even went to Akshay Singh’s house in New Delhi to offer a job to the deceased scribe’s sister and financial support which the bereaved family rejected.
Chouhan should have seen red when the special investigation team (SIT), set up in November 2014 by the Madhya Pradesh High Court to monitor the progress of the STF investigation, reported 23 unnatural deaths of those accused and witnesses in the scam on May 27. The SIT is being led by retired judge justice Chandresh Bhushan. Its status report to the court containing names of the 23 dead immediately brought other suspected deaths into sharp focus. Media speculated that the actual number of dead might be over 40. In its subsequent status report to the high court, the SIT too updated the death figure to 32 with nine more deaths being detected.
(L-R) Aaj Tak special correspondent Akshay Singh, Jabalpur Medical College dean Arun Sharma and MP governor’s son Shailesh Yadav have all died mysteriously in the past few months
(L-R) Aaj Tak special correspondent Akshay Singh, Jabalpur Medical College dean Arun Sharma and MP governor’s son Shailesh Yadav have all died mysteriously in the past few months
Most of the dead were young men between 25 and 30 years. The SIT report created a sensation in the local media. Till then only four suspicious deaths had hit the headlines but the police declined to probe any of them. Medical student 19-year-old Namrata Damor’s death was explained away as suicide that had occurred long before the scam surfaced. Her body was found on the railway track near Ujjain on January 6, 2012. A student of Indore medical college, Namrata had allegedly cleared the pre-medical test in 2009 fraudulently. A panel of three doctors, who conducted her postmortem, had declared she died of violent asphyxia which pointed to murder. Yet, the Ujjain police closed the case as a suicide.
The very idea that the younger generation can be prevented from moving around or that freedom to use the internet can be curtailed, sounds ridiculous. This is evident from innumerable failed attempts to curb internet and free flow of information.
Likewise, the police refused to see any foul play in the death of Governor Ram Naresh Yadav’s son Shailesh. His body was found at his Lucknow residence in March 2015. The STF was on the lookout for Shailesh for helping eight candidates clear the contract teacher test after taking `3 lakh each from them. The police also did not deem it fit to probe the gruesome death of Jabalpur Medical College dean Dr GS Sakalle who allegedly committed suicide by pouring kerosene on his body at his residence on July 4, 2014. Dr Sakalle was scrutinizing the list of medical students who got admission since 2008. And Vijay Patel, an accused in three cases of job rigging, was found dead in April, 2015 in a hotel owned by a BJP leader in Kanker (Chhattisgarh). The MP police passed the buck on to their Chhattisgarh counterparts.
The government explained away the deaths as caused by road accidents, suicides and illnesses without promising a deeper probe. But Bhushan, assured the media that he would urge the high court to order a probe by the STF into the causes of these deaths. In the days that followed, the media patiently waited for the high court to issue such an order. No one in state establishment reckoned that it was a proverbial lull.
It was on June 28 that the storm broke. On that day, veterinary surgeon Narendra Singh Tomar, 28, died in an Indore jail under mysterious circumstances. He was in custody since February for helping two medical students clear the pre-medical test in 2009. Outrage over his death was compounded by the death of Dr Rajendra Arya in a Gwalior hospital. Dr Arya, who was accused of arranging impersonators to appear in exams, was on bail since February last year after being arrested.
There was media frenzy as Aaj Tak channel’s special correspondent Akshay Singh suddenly collapsed after allegedly frothing in the mouth in distant Meghnagar town of Jhabua district on July 4. He had gone to interview the father of Namrata Damor who had mysteriously died. Singh’s death assu-med a more sinister dimension when a whistle blower and forensic expert, Dr Anand Rai, alleged that the journalist may have been insidiously administered a slow poison that reacts late but fatally with the chemicals in the body. The recovery of Jabalpur Medical College dean, Dr Arun Sharma’s body in a New Delhi hotel the following morning had the media more furiously dubbing the Vya-pam as the most murderous scandal India had ever seen.
HE FINALLY BLINKED
Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was, predictably, a very perturbed man as the national media screamed murder and the opposition gunned for his resignation with renewed vigour. Already scarred by Lalitgate, the BJP leadership was rattled by the vociferous outburst. The chief minister, who would earlier depute his ministers to deal with media queries on the issue, finally acquiesced to the party leadership’s advice to do the explaining himself. In the press conference on July 5 at his residence in Bhopal Chouhan’s characteristic élan was missing.
He stonewalled all questions on a CBI probe by pointing out that the Madhya Pradesh High Court was satisfied with the STF enquiry and the Supreme Court too had endorsed the lower court’s decision to reject petitions for a CBI probe in the past. There-fore, he argued that agreeing to any independent probe at this stage would tantamount to insulting the high court and he would not do that. “I have utmost regard in the Indian judicial system,” he repeated ad nauseam in the press meet, only to take a U-turn the very next day.
Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh alleges that the chief minister had his name replaced with that of Union Minister Uma Bharti in a tampered excel sheet.
On July 6 the chief minister called media-persons to tell them that he was going to write to the high court that the state government intended to handover the STF probe to the CBI in view of growing public pressure. He attributed his decision to the public perception that he had something to hide by opposing a CBI investigation. Later, however, it transpired that his sanctimonious reverence to public perception (lok laj) was not the reason behind his volte face. The real reason was BJP president Amit Shah’s call, asking him to spare the party more opprobrium on account of the Vyapam scam.
The chief minister’s move was viewed as a desperate attempt to make a virtue out of necessity. A clutch of four petitions for a CBI probe was already slated to be heard in the Supreme Court on July 9. It was almost a foregone conclusion that in the light of the damning disclosures in the scam, parti-cularly over the 40 suspicious deaths, the apex court would have no hesitation in upholding the petitioners’ pleas. And precisely that happened. The Supreme Court also expressed displeasure with the Madhya Pradesh High Court for “washing its hands off” a similar petition of the state government a day before. The high court had refused to act on the state government’s petition for a CBI probe, citing the four petitions pending before the Supreme Court.
On the same day, the Supreme Court also served a four-week notice to the Madhya Pradesh Governor Ram Naresh Yadav and the union government on a petition seeking his removal from his post. The governor was accused of taking `3 lakh each from five candidates who appeared for a professional examination board exam. He allegedly took the money from them in the Raj Bhawan premises. The governor’s then officer on special duty, Dhanraj Yadav, is already in jail on similar bribery charges. The governor’s son, Shailesh, was also involved in the racket. Yadav’s continuation in his post had become untenable after an FIR was lodged against him in April this year on the Madhya Pradesh high court‘s direction to the STF. However, the same court stalled any action against the governor a month later accepting his contention of constitutional immunity.
SNOWBALLING EFFECT
When Chouhan ordered setting up a STF to probe into the Vyapam scam a month after it surfaced in Indore in July 2013, he probably thought it a smart move that would effectively silence the opposition. At that time, Shivraj’s popularity was at its peak. The assembly election in Madhya Pradesh was barely three months away and the main Opposition, the Congress, was too demoralized to make the burgeoning scam a potent poll plank. His gambit paid off. People bought into the chief minister’s assertion that he sincerely wanted to get to the bottom of the case. Result: the BJP returned to power in the election with a bigger majority than before.
But the scam snowballed. Initially, it looked like an exposé of a homegrown nexus of pre-medical test admission mafia and the MP professional examination board officials. But it metamorphosed into the biggest swindle of India as the board’s examination controller, Pankaj Trivedi, started singing like a canary in police custody. He confessed that a dozen-odd recruitment tests conducted by the board had been rigged since 2008. The board’s chief system analyst, Nitin Mahin-dra’s computer hard disk was a veritable minefield where names of those recommending candidates were duly mentioned in excel sheets. They included the governor, Union Minister Uma Bharti, RSS leader Suresh Soni, bureaucrats and their relatives apart from middlemen and job racketeers. The scam simply got bigger and bigger. It also gained a momentum of its own.
In Bhopal there is much speculation on what will happen to the chief minister once the CBI takes over the probe from the STF. Like the governor, the chief minister too is facing allegations of direct complicity in the scam. He is accused of having tampered with an original excel sheet from a hard disk in the Vyapam board office that had the chief minister’s name entered 48 times as a person who recommended candidates for a contract teachers recruitment test. Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh alleges that the chief minister had his name replaced with that of Union Minister Uma Bharti in the tampered excel sheet.
3
At the moment the chief minister is clearly skating on thin ice and will need all the support of his well-wishers in the BJP high command. But will party back him? Or will his detractors seize the opportunity to settle old scores? The chief minister looks visibly shaken and unsettled and is already the shadow of the man he used to be only a few months ago. 
 
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Monday, July 13, 2015

As Vyapam Goes to CBI, Hopes Rise that ‘DMAT Scam’ Will Be Probed Too


BY  ON 14/07/2015

Both admission scams have not only hollowed out public health facilities in the state but also struck a blow to the aspirations, confidence and future of an entire generation

Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medicine, Indore
Aurobindo Medical College, Indore, one of several private medical colleges in Madhya Pradesh whose admissions were allegedly compromised
Bhopal: Ask whistleblowers Anand Rai, Ashish Chaturvedi and Prashant Pandey whether the Supreme Court ruling entrusting the Vyapam scam probe to the CBI has fulfilled their objectives and they will tell you that their mission in Madhya Pradesh is not quite over, for the canvas of corruption stretches much wider.
As of now, the trio is awaiting the apex court’s ruling on their petitions seeking a CBI investigation into yet another explosive admission racket in the state. This high-end scam involves IAS/IPS officers, judges as well as influential BJP and Congress politicians as beneficiaries of the manipulation of the Dental and Medical Test (DMAT) conducted by the Association of Private Dental and Medical Colleges of Madhya Pradesh (APDMC). The APDMC admits around 1500 candidates every year in undergraduate programmes run by the six private medical and 16 private dental colleges in the state.
The Supreme Court heard the DMAT petitions on July 9, the day it handed Vyapam over to the CBI. However, it deferred its verdict on how to handle this related scam by a week since the petitioners sought to provide additional information regarding the collusion of people in high places as well as the trail of black money that kept the dodgy process going. According to Rai, the DMAT scam is estimated to have netted its beneficiaries anywhere between a staggering Rs 8000 crore and Rs 10,000 crore.
List of top names
The names mentioned by the Congress and whistleblowers as beneficiaries of the DMAT scamread like a who’s who of the state’s legislative and judicial spectrum. Prominent among them is the name of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s wife Sadhana Singh, whose niece secured admission in a Bhopal medical college in 2012. Anand Rai, who was the first to flag the issue of fraudulent admissions in private medical colleges, says that from the inception of the DMAT in 2006, as many as four ministers in the present Chouhan government and four ministers from the CM’s earlier tenure have secured admissions for close relatives in private medical colleges. But politicians weren’t the only ones to take advantage of the system. The list of alleged beneficiaries makes for impressive reading:
VIPS WHOSE WARDS HAVE ALLEGEDLY BENEFITED FROM DMAT IRREGULARITIES
JudiciaryJustice SC Sinho
Justice Abhay Gohil
Justice AK Maheshwari
Justice Shantilal Kochar
Judge PC Gupta
Judge KC Garg
Judge Shrawan Raghuvanshi
Bureaucracy and PoliceRenu Pant
Suhail Akhtar
Mahendra Singh Sikarwar
Dharmendra Chudhary
Rajesh Hingankar
BJP politiciansNarottam Mishra
Umashankar Gupta
Prakash Sonkar
Vishnu Dutta Sharma
Akhilesh Pandey
Harnam Singh Rathore
Congress politiciansArun Yadav
Arif Aqueel
Tulsi Silawat
Hajarilal Raghuvanshi
PC Sharma
Sunil Sud
Gajendra Singh
Source: Multiple press reports (1)
Hope rises, and dims
Even as the political slugfest continues in Madhya Pradesh, a recent development has made Rai, Chaturvedi and Pandey hopeful of a ruling in their favour by the Supreme Court.
Some time ago, whistleblower and former legislator Paras Saklecha moved the High Court seeking cancellation of the DMAT scheduled on June 21 this year because candidates were allowed to apply well beyond the stipulated cut-off date, in fact till the very last moment. On July 11, the Madhya Pradesh High Court passed an order acknowledging grave irregularities in DMAT 2015 and directed the APDMC to conduct the test in a more transparent manner. Issuing strict instructions to curb exam malpractices, the High Court directed APDMC to install optimal mark recognition (OMR) scanners at examination centres so as to prevent any tampering with answer sheets at a later stage. Further, the court directed that the scanned copies of completed OMR sheets be kept with different authorities, including the Principal Secretary (Home) and that these sheets be matched with the original sheets before the declaration of results.
However, the June 21 DMAT that was rescheduled to July 12, was postponed yet again. While the APDMC cited lack of preparedness to meet the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s directives as the reason for the postponement, a likelier reason is the difficulty it faces in figuring out how to deal with the candidates who have already booked seats in colleges after paying a hefty donation.
Dodgy from the word go
The DMAT has been under a cloud from its very inception in 2006. Following complaints of huge irregularities in the very first DMAT, Shivraj Singh Chouhan set up the Justice Chandresh Bhushan committee to monitor DMAT-linked cases. This is the same Justice Bhushan who later became chairman of the special investigation team (SIT) that monitored the investigation of the special task force (STF) into the Vyapam scam before the Supreme Court ordered a CBI probe into it on July 9.
Justice Bhushan had the first DMAT cancelled in the wake of allegations of question paper leaks and other irregularities. The credibility of the DMAT took another hit when the Bhopal Crime Branch seized incriminating documents, post-dated cheques and cash from an employee of a private dental college at Bhopal.
The trajectory of the DMAT was not very different the following year either. In 2007, it was the turn of the student wing of the ruling BJP, namely the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), to petition the Madhya Pradesh High Court for closer police scrutiny of the admission test process. Similar grounds of gross opacity in the admission process were cited in the petition to demand the cancellation of DMAT 2007.  However, the court’s intervention did little to restore the test’s credibility.  The APDMC’s gravy train continued undeterred on the rails of huge amounts of money coughed up by ineligible candidates upon securing admission.
Five years later, in October 2013, when the Bhopal police came within inches of exposing the scam, it seemed as if the APDMC’s uninterrupted run was finally about to end. However, the operation was scuttled due to political intervention. Reason: Madhya Pradesh assembly elections were barely a month away and the ruling BJP was obviously not inclined to antagonise the owners of private medical colleges, all of whom had liberally financed the party’s expensive election campaign. It was quid pro quo time.
Investigations thwarted
Police officers state on condition of anonymity that had it not been for instructions from their political masters to obfuscate the investigation, the DMAT scam would have unravelled easily after the interrogation of LN Medical College director Anupam Chouksey in October 2013.
Secretary Mr. Anupam Chouksey Sir Welcoming Honorable Chief Guests At State Hanger, Bhopal.
File photo from 2013 of Anupam Chouksey, Kapil Sibal and Ghulam Nabi Azad, at the time Union HRD and Health ministers respectively in the former UPA government, with the caption ‘Secretary Mr. Anupam Chouksey Sir Welcoming Honorable Chief Guests At State Hanger, Bhopal’. Credit: LN College Facebook page
Chouksey also happens to be secretary of the APDMC and is a supporter of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which has used the college campus for its brainstorming sessions. In fact, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has even stayed in the LN college campus.
During his interrogation, Chouksey reportedly told the police that it was a fairly common practice to sell exam forms beyond the cut-off date so that students could appear in the test. Subsequent police investigations uncovered more aspects of the scam. For instance, the arrest of Nagarjuna, a resident of Andhra Pradesh, from a Bhopal hotel in November 2013 revealed that he was a commission agent who got aspiring candidates from Andhra Pradesh for the DMAT test in Madhya Pradesh. The 25-year-old Nagarjuna, an MBA from Bangalore, was accused of issuing forged admission letters and was interrogated for his links with other gangs involved in forgery of documents in the city.
In fact, the entire modus operandi of the DMAT scam came to light in 2013 when over a dozen students from Andhra Pradesh complained of being duped of Rs 3 crore by a gang that had promised them admission in private medical and dental colleges in Madhya Pradesh. What’s more, in the course of police investigation it was ascertained that the accused in the case had links with LN Medical College as well as the APDMC office. The father of one of the students later posted a video on YouTube and complained that despite Chouksey’s arrest, their money had still not been returned.
The connections could not have been more glaring: One of the arrested individuals, Surendra Singh Chouhan, had introduced himself to the complainants as a personal assistant of the college director Anupam Chouksey. In some cases, victims allegedly paid money to Chouhan even outside Chouksey’s chamber at LN Medical College.
In all, six interstate gangs involved in the swindle of providing forged admission letters for medical seats to the tune of Rs 3 crore were busted by the police. One complainant said he had paid around Rs 17 lakh for a medical seat for his son for the next academic session.  On raiding the DMAT office, the police recovered around Rs 5 lakh cash and seized admission records and computers from the office. But the matter simply did not proceed beyond this stage.
Evidence kept surfacing all over, pointing to the deep rot in the system. Around the same time, a scam in the Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) admission test was unearthed in Barkatullah University of Bhopal by the Madhya Pradesh police. In this instance, hired writers wrote the answers outside the exam hall. Around two dozen persons were arrested. During the same month, i.e. October 2013, one Komal Pandey was arrested for duping dozens of students throughout the country by assuring them seats in private medical colleges of Madhya Pradesh. Yet the scam continued unhindered. The police did not follow the trail of the crimes with due diligence. Consequently, the cases faded from public memory.
DMAT scale vs Vyapam range
RNY at Index College
File photo from 2012 of Madhya Pradesh Governor Ram Naresh Yadav, accused by the police of involvement in the Vyapam scam but protected by constitutional immunity, at a function at the Index Medical College in Indore. Credit: indexgroup.co.in
In terms of their morphology, the DMAT fraud is less complicated then the multi-layered Vyapam scam.  When the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government privatised medical education, it created the need for a separate test for admission to private medical colleges. In 2006, with the approval of the Medical Council of India (MCI) and the Union Health Ministry, a separate test was held for seats in the management quota in private medical colleges in Madhya Pradesh. Later, following a Supreme Court ruling stipulating reservation of 15 per cent seats for Non Resident Indians (NRIs), it was decided with the consent of all stakeholders that 58 per cent of the seats (including 43 per cent management quota and 15 per cent NRI quota) would be filled through admission tests conducted by private medical and dental colleges, while the remaining 42 per cent seats would be filled through the pre-medical test (PMT) conducted for government colleges by the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board (MPPEB), or Vyapam, in which candidates who score below the cut-off marks required for government colleges are offered seats in the private medical colleges.
As the body representing private medical colleges, the APDMC has devised ways and means of ensuring that nearly 100 per cent of its seats are sold for a handsome price. The association books seats in advance for a price starting from Rs 15 lakh for almost all the 58 per cent seats that fall under its dispensation. The candidates who are ‘booked’ are told to leave their OMR sheet blank so that the correct answers can be written on them later.
The remaining 42 percent seats are filled by Vyapam employing three kinds of fraud as has been described by this correspondent in The Wire in an earlier report: one, brilliant students are hired to impersonate registered candidates; two, brilliant students or scorers are seated along with ‘booked’ aspirants ‘engine and bogey’ style so that the aspirants can copy from their answer sheets for a price; and, three, OMR sheets are left blank or incomplete to be filled with correct answers later. This last method was common to the DMAT exam as well.
Cover of the prospectus for DMAT 2015
Cover of the prospectus for DMAT 2015
The method whereby a brilliant student register himself as a dummy candidate, works smoothly. Once the result is out, the successful dummies vacate their seats at the last moment. The APDMC then fills the resulting vacancies with candidates from the management quota who are willing to pay a high price for those seats. The exam takers who vacate their seats are paid between Rs 2 lakh to Rs 3 lakh each.
There is some overlap between the modus operandi of Vyapam and DMAT but unlike the former, which has spawned a complex nexus of several hundred beneficiaries making money at the expense of thousands of gullible youths seeking recruitment or admission to medical colleges, the DMAT scam resembles a cosy club of the rich and the influential, such as politicians, judges, bureaucrats and businessmen. Also, there is a vast difference in the stakes involved in the two scams: while an undergraduate seat in a government medical college would fetch an average of Rs 3 lakh to Rs 5 lakh in the Vyapam scheme of things, the same seat in a private medical college would fetch the owner up to Rs 1 crore through the DMAT fraud.
There is also a vital difference in the way the two admission scams have been perceived by people in Madhya Pradesh. The Vyapam scandal, which impacted a large number of youths largely from the middle and lower middle classes, made a deep impression on the minds of the people. The shocking spectacle of boys and girls being herded to police stations like hardened criminals and poignant stories of parents having pawned their worldly assets to procure the amount required to secure admission for their children to medical colleges has pricked the collective consciousness of the state. The DMAT scam, on the other hand, has been viewed cynically as an exchange of wealth between affluent sections of society. Perhaps that is why it did not become a bigger issue until now.
Moreover, while news about the DMAT racket has made it to the local media time and again, the fact that newspaper proprietors belong to the same cosy club has prevented the occasional news items from building up to a sustained media campaign against corruption in the sector of higher professional education. To put it baldly, private medical colleges are a big source of advertisement revenue for newspapers. There are instances of individuals associated with such institutions who own newspapers, among them Suresh Vijayvargiya (Peoples’ Group) and JN Chouksey of the LN Group of colleges.
Two sides of corrupt coin
However, now that the lid has been blown off the Vyapam scandal, the domino effect has come into play. The growing public outrage over the magnitude of Vyapam-related ‘unnatural deaths’ as well as the arrest on May 30 of an accused, Yogesh Uprit, with links to both Vyapam and DMAT has made people view DMAT for what it is: an extension of the canker of Vyapam that has affected the fortunes of an entire generation.
Yogesh Uprit. Credit: Nai Dunia
Yogesh Uprit. Credit: Nai Dunia
Uprit, 75, was arrested by an officer of the SIT in Gwalior on the charge of helping a medical student from Jabalpur secure a postgraduate seat in the Jabalpur Medical College after taking Rs 25 lakh from her father, a well known neurologist. Uprit’s arrest resulted in a closer scrutiny of the link between Vyapam and DMAT as he has played a key role in both – in the capacity of director in Vyapam and, post-retirement, as controller DMAT, as desired by the APDMC. While in custody, Uprit apparently confessed to having copied the template of Vyapam’s former chief system analyst Nitin Mahindra (now in prison) for manipulating the DMAT.
Uprit also told investigators that the modus operandi used in Vyapam and DMAT was the same. Candidates who paid money were told to leave their OMR sheets blank so that they could be filled with the right answers later.
Most importantly, Uprit disclosed that the DMAT has been a complete sham since its very inception, with all its seats being sold to bidders in high places capable of paying high prices. He divulged that from 2006 onward, every successive health minister in the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government has taken Rs 10 crore from the APDMC to desist from exposing the scam. No wonder that State Congress chief Arun Yadav has been quick to state that Uprit’s allegations are so grave that either he should be booked for making sensational accusations or the ministers he has accused should be arrested.
Mind-numbing figures
Assuming that Uprit’s confession of 100 per cent rigging in the DMAT is true, the scam is estimated to be in the region of Rs 8,000 to Rs 10,000 crore, rivalling Vyapam in magnitude. In nine years, more than 13,000 admissions have taken place in private medical and dental colleges. Around 1,500 graduate and postgraduate seats were filled up every year in private colleges. Candidates reportedly paid between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 1 crore to secure a Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS), MBBS or postgraduate seat. Going by that, says whistleblower Anand Rai, “over Rs 10,000 crore has easily been transacted in the DMAT scam. All the seats in the private colleges were compromised.“
In a similar vein, 26-year-old Chaturvedi stresses the importance of CBÏ “taking up the investigation of the DMAT scam under the monitoring of Supreme Court precisely because of the many prominent people involved.”
To lend weight to the accusations in their petitions to the Supreme Court, Rai, Chaturvedi and Pandey have cited the decision of the state’s Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee (AFRC) to impose a fine of Rs 13.10 crore on six private medical colleges in the state for massive irregularities in conducting admission tests from 2010 to 2013. All the six medical colleges have been found guilty of fraudulently converting seats under the state quota into management seats so as to earn exorbitant profits from their sale to candidates. The MCI has asked all those colleges to surrender the state quota seats that they have thus manipulated. On its part, the APDMC has moved the Supreme Court against the MCI directive as well as AFRC’s decision to slap a fine on th
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