BHOPAL: Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh filed a private complaint in a special court in Bhopal seeking prosecution of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Union minister Uma Bharti and others in the Vyapam scam.
In the complaint submitted on Wednesday, Singh claimed the Excel sheet retrieved from the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) seized from Nitin Mohindra, a key accused, in 2013 was manipulated by the police in Indore to save big BJP leaders, including Bharti and Chouhan.
Bharti is a former chief minister of the state.
Singh added the report of a private lab (Truth Lab) on tampering of the Excel sheet stated that the sheet originally contained the word ‘CM’, which, he claimed, was later removed.
The senior Congress leader alleged that the MP Police Special Task Force and the CBI ignored the available evidence in the matter for not naming several BJP leaders, including Chouhan and Bharti, as accused.
He submitted 27,000 pages of evidence to support his private complaint against the seven individuals, which included senior IPS officer and present ADG of MP police Vipin Maheshwari (who was posted as IG Indore in 2013).
The other police officers named in the complaint were then ASP, Crime-Indore, Dilip Soni, then Bhopal SSP Sriniwas Verma, Shailendra Singh Chouhan and APS Chauhan, both posted then as ASP in Bhopal.
According to Singh’s counsel Ajay Gupta, the special CBI court where the complaint was filed directed Singh to record his statements before it on September 22.
The development came nearly 11 months after the CBI submitted to the court in October 2017 that it had been concluded that there was no tampering in the HDD.
The CBI, while charge-sheeting 490 accused in one of the Vyapam cases in October 2017, had submitted before the court that based on the reports of the forensic analysis of the HDD, it hasn’t come to the fore that any file with the letters “CM” was stored in them.
The multi-crore scam refers to massive admission and recruitment rackets which allegedly manipulated entrance examinations conducted by the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board, commonly known as ‘Vyapam’.