Paper leak protests spiral in Uttarakhand, Dhami calls it ‘nakal jihad’

The Uttarakhand Subordinate Service Selection Commission exam was held on Sunday between 11 am and 1 pm, and allegations of paper leak surfaced after three pages of the question paper were circulated online. So far, two of the accused, identified as Khalid Malik and his sister Sabia, have been arrested. Protesters claimed that the incident is not limited to the two individuals.

At the training workshop for new office bearers of the party, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami termed the incident “nakal (cheating) jihad”.

“To destroy the future of the youth, they gang up to conspire to leak the paper. The coaching mafia and cheating mafia come together to carry out nakal jihad in the state… to spread anarchy in the region. To those mafias and jihadis, I warn you that as long as the mafia is not destroyed. We will not rest,” he said.

Responding to this, senior Congress leader Suryakant Dhasama said that the BJP government takes the “easy route of communalism in the face of failures”.

“The state was created to address unemployment, education, health and migration crises.  These matters have yet to be resolved. A day before the exam, scammer Hakam Singh was arrested. Similarly, several names associated with this incident have surfaced. But for the CM, this is also jihad. Over 22,000 people are in contractual positions, waiting to be regularised, and several recruitment tests for forest, police, PWD, and irrigation departments have been on hold for a long time. The government has failed to address the miseries of people,” he said.

According to the police, Malik appeared for the exam at Adarsh Bal Sadan Intercollege in Haridwar and allegedly shared three photos with his sister Sabia from the exam centre. Sabia purportedly sent it to Malik’s friend Suman to get the questions solved.

Dehradun Senior Superintendent of Police Ajai Singh said that Suman, a professor at a college in Tehri, had allegedly solved the questions but did not send the answers and informed youth leader Bobby Panwar about the same.

Panwar later took to social media to allege rigging by sharing the photos. Khalid worked as a junior engineer in Rishikesh and was acquainted with Suman while she was working as an officer at the municipal corporation there, the police said.

Singh said that prima facie, Suman appears not to have been involved and will be treated as a witness in the case. She was, however, the first accused to be named in the FIR registered in the case.

The principal of the college where the leak took place is Dharmendra Chauhan, the media in-charge of the BJP in Haridwar. He told The Indian Express that while 18 classrooms housed candidates, only 15 had jammers to intercept signals. A total of 432 candidates were allotted the centre, and 292 showed up for the test. “We had flagged this to the commission, and a few jammers were shared between exam halls. Khalid was in a hall which did not have a jammer,” he added.

SSP Singh added that the administrative lapses emerging from the centre will be looked into by the Uttarakhand Subordinate Service Selection Commission.

A day before the test, the Special Task Force and Dehradun police had arrested two people, Pankaj Gaur and Hakam Singh, for allegedly promising six aspirants success in the exam in return for Rs 12-15 lakh. Singh had previously also been arrested in another UKSSSC paper leak in 2021. Following the 2021 leak, the government brought in a law to crack down on the mafia involved in leaking the question paper. The protesters have claimed that the act has failed to prevent malpractices.