Asia | Statewide scams in India

Dial M for Madhya

A mass-murder mystery in the heart of the country now threatens to poison national politics

|INDORE

THE fallout only grows from a labyrinthine conspiracy to rig the results of a technical examinations board in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The scam involves local politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, businessmen and criminal gangs. Investigators believe they have received no less than $3 billion in kickbacks over five years from students and their families keen to secure a limited number of places in government and in state medical and other colleges. One person who has seen the police files says a single postgraduate seat could be bought for over $250,000.

An investigation that began with the arrest in 2013 of 20 people accused of impersonating candidates has now implicated over 2,000. And once the bodies of potential witnesses started piling up, the rest of the country started to take notice. About 50 people thought to be connected to the Vyapam scam, named after the acronym for the exams board, have turned up dead.

A young man said by police to have hanged himself was found by his family lying dead on the floor, with nails driven into his skull. An autopsy showed that a girl who was supposed to have fallen from a train was strangled. A 38-year-old television reporter who came down from Delhi, the capital, to interview the girl’s family himself fell dead outside their home, a few minutes after taking tea with them. Now the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is reviewing a lengthening list of suspicious deaths. What the dead have in common is that they all learned something of the inner workings of the scam which, in its very simplest form, involved a sitter paying someone to pass him answers to a test.

In the town of Indore, Anand Rai, a government medical officer, cuts briskly through a hotel lobby for an interview. As a whistle-blower seeking to get to the bottom of the Vyapam scandal, Dr Rai’s life may be under threat. He has an armed constable scuttling behind him, but Dr Rai dismisses him with a gesture. He says he is not reassured by having a state bodyguard. “If anyone is trying to kill me, it’s them,” Dr Rai says, referring to state actors.

As he sees it, the harassment comes from the top of Madhya Pradesh. On July 17th Dr Rai had complained to the CBI that a senior figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has run the state for a decade, pulled strings to put his own daughter into Indore’s best medical college. Two days later Dr Rai was suddenly transferred to a smaller town. His wife, also a government doctor, was moved to a third place. Together, they have a young child to bring up.

Under the shadow of Vyapam, it is not just the state assembly in Bhopal that has fallen into disarray but also the national parliament in Delhi. Its annual “monsoon” session was meant to start last week. Yet the opposition Congress party is frustrating its opening. It is clamouring for the state’s chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, to be dismissed (along with another chief minister and India’s foreign minister, each caught up in another scam).

If the opposition ensures that the monsoon session is a washout, then the national government of the BJP will have missed a vital chance to pursue reforms to land acquisition and labour practices, as well as to introduce a much-needed goods-and-services tax. That would weaken the standing of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Mr Modi will not lightly dismiss ministers. He keeps a constant eye turned to state elections, which take place in India on a rolling basis. Bihar will be the next to vote, probably in October, and the BJP’s opponents there are putting up a strong front. Mr Modi has to stand by his comrades rather than admit wrongdoing or mistakes. Instead of cleaning house, the BJP is launching a counter-offensive against Congress-led states, looking for scandals in Uttarakhand and elsewhere.

However many of Vyapam’s victims have been murdered, far more have not. At the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial medical college in Indore, Dr Rai’s alma mater, swotting freshmen are grateful to Dr Rai for exposing the scandal. One of them, Kartik Batham, is 21 years old. He never paid a bribe and failed the admissions test two years in a row, until the scandal broke and the Vyapam board came under scrutiny. He is sure he would have kept on failing had it not been for the bravery of Dr Rai and other whistle-blowers. One of his classmates, in whom the murders have instilled fear, resents the shadow the racket has cast on his vocation. When young doctors feel ashamed to disclose their profession in public, for fear people might think their position was bought, then there is, he says, “something devilish going on”. He thinks a national exams board might solve the problem of state-run rackets. But this week’s mudslinging in Delhi makes that devilishly hard to imagine.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Dial M for Madhya"

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