The Vyapam controversy is set to deepen with the revelation that the whistleblower will submit a set of call records to the Delhi High Court. The records pertain to text messages exchanged between interested parties, the scam accused and some highly influential persons in Madhya Pradesh.
“These records will open the Pandora’s box, exposing several high-profile names that have not figured in the STF interrogation yet,” the whistleblower, an IT expert, told The Hindu .
The text messages contain details of interested applicants — their names and roll numbers — and negotiations for the price of admission to a professional course or recruitment to a post.
“The STF needs to get the call detail records of these high profile people ... and match them with the call records of the other accused who are already in jail,” he said.
Last week, the Congress had alleged that Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was involved in the scam, and accused the STF of fudging documents to shield him. The whistleblower, who had assisted the Indore police and subsequently the Special Task Force in the investigations, was granted police protection by the Delhi High Court last week. In his plea, he offered to submit all records, including the basis on which the Congress made the allegations, to the Delhi High Court.
He claims to have unearthed gigabytes of sensitive data from the laptops of the scam accused, besides obtaining a comprehensive list of call detail records, both of which could lead the investigation towards people in top positions.
The whistleblower says he has been harassed by the State police since September 2013, when he started assisting the STF in its investigations. He claims to have installed secret cameras and microphones in the STF headquarters on the instruction of superiors.
On August 6 last year, the Bhopal police allegedly picked him up after he left the STF premises after a day’s work, and booked him under the IT Act, seizing his laptop and mobile phone. Four days later, after a lower court granted him bail, he returned home to Indore.
However, he claims, a team of Bhopal police picked him up from his home at 3:30 in the morning and took him to the newly constructed SP office in old Bhopal, where he was interrogated. He was let off after he assured them he would remain tight-lipped about the scam.
However, government sources dismissed the whistleblower’s claims, saying he has a history of running into trouble with the law-enforcement agencies.
