The Congress cried foul a day after the CBI gave a clean chit to Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in the Vyapam case. “We will file a private plea in the trial court. We will investigate the investigator as the CBI now stands for Compromised Bureau of Investigation,” Congress spokesperson Kapil Sibal said, alleging that the probe agency completely ignored the evidence available.
The agency filed a chargesheet before a special CBI court on Tuesday in which it said that forensic analysis of the hard disc drives seized from Nitin Mohindra, an official at Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board, by the police had shown that no files having letters “CM” were stored in them.
The CBI findings are seen as a major relief for Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who will be facing assembly elections next year.
Sibal, former law minister and senior advocate in the Supreme Court, claimed the party has evidence in a pen drive to nail the chief minister. He said the data in it has been vetted by Truth Labs, an independent forensic laboratory in Hyderabad.
The Vyapam case is referred to massive irregularities in recruitment for various Madhya Pradesh government jobs. The CBI has registered multiple FIRs to investigate the case. The Congress has been raising the scam both in the state and at the Central level to target Chouhan and the BJP, but could not derive political mileage out of it. The Congress stepped up its attack given Assembly elections in MP next year, where the party hopes to benefit from Chouhan’s three-term anti-incumbency. Sibal accused the local police of tampered with the hard disk containing details of those involved in the jobs-for-cash scam to save Chouhan and his associates.
“The hard disk, which is with the CBI, and our pendrive can be sent to an international forensic lab for a fair probe,” he said, adding the party will not let the BJP leader go scot free. KTS Tulsi, an independent Rajya Sabha member and senior advocate in the Supreme Court, said he is involved with the case and never came across a scam in which over 50 witnesses have lost their lives. Tulsi said, “The fight may be a long one but all those guilty will be punished.” Vivek Tankha, head of the Congress legal department said whistle blowers in the Vyapam case, Prashant Pandey and Anand Rai, were being threatened. “We will defend all those whose voices will be suppressed in the case,” said Tankha, who worked hard to expose the multi-million scam.
