A whistleblower in the Vyapam scam has written to the CBI demanding that a video, which purportedly shows former technical education minister and one of the main accused Laxmikant Sharma in the company of one of the five women accused in the honey trap case, be treated as evidence for further investigation. The video, which went viral last week, purportedly shows the former BJP leader admitting that he concealed information regarding the alleged complicity of a former chief minister, a former Union minister and a senior RSS leader in the scam. The demand by whistleblower Anand Rai comes in the wake of a Special CBI Court convicting and sending 31 persons, including candidates, impersonators and racketeers, to jail for seven to 10 years in one of the Vyapam cases related to irregularities in the examination conducted for police constable posts. The Vyapam scam had come to light in July 2013 when senior BJP leader Shivraj Singh Chouhan was the chief minister and Sharma a senior minister. Sharma was released on bail in December 2015 after spending 19 months in jail since his arrest in 2014. The video shows Sharma engaged in conversation with Shweta Swapnil Jain, one of the main accused in the honey trap case, and a male accomplice. It appears that the video was filmed about two years after Sharma’s release when he was in relative political oblivion. He had lost the 2013 Assembly elections and was expelled by the BJP after his arrest. The whistleblower alleged that Sharma has claimed in the video that he chose to become a fall guy to save BJP and RSS leaders in the Vyapam case. “Had I wanted, I would have brought down the government,” Sharma claims at one point. Sharma did not respond to repeated attempts by The Indian Express for his comment. After the video went viral, he went incommunicado for some days before uploading a video pointing to a conspiracy to malign his image. He did not mention the video but the inference was obvious. While the BJP did not react to the video, Chief Minister Kamal Nath’s media coordinator Narendra Saluja alleged that the Opposition party’s silence was proof that Sharma’s claims were true. He alleged that the BJP during its 15-year rule engaged in corrupt and immoral practices and the honey trap case exposed its duplicity. Referring to the latest verdict in a Vyapam case, Rai said that only candidates and middlemen were made accused in a scam that was perpetrated by senior government officials, ministers and their close aides. “It’s unfortunate that the real culprits of Vyapam scam who were involved at the highest level have evaded the process of law, are at large and yet to be brought to justice,” he said in the letter to the CBI, stating that he would be forced to approach a judicial forum if the agency failed to secure the custody of the video and other evidence by legal process. The honey trap case came to light in September after an engineer with the Indore Municipal Corporation filed a complaint alleging that he was being blackmailed by two women who were demanding Rs 3 crore for not circulating video clips showing him in a compromising position with one of them. The investigators have so far arrested five women and a car driver in connection with the scam that allegedly involved trapping senior government officials, including IAS officers and politicians. A special investigation team is probing the honey trap case and the HC is monitoring its progress. A video of Sharma and a purported audio of a former bureaucrat engaged in sexually explicit conversation with a honey trap accused had gone viral last week. The government had denied the allegations of the SIT leaking the audio and video clips, suggesting they were already in someone’s possession.
