The Congress on Wednesday strongly protested against the Central Bureau of Investigation's clean chit to Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in the Vyapam scam, accusing the probe agency of manipulating evidence at the behest of the BJP regime. The party said that it will file a private complaint against the agency in a trial court in Madhya Pradesh.
The CBI in its chargesheet in the Vyapam case says that the hard disk recovered from the office of the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board has not been tampered with and it does not name Chouhan, contrary to the claim of Congress leader Digvijaya Singh.
However, the Congress fielded three eminent lawyers—Kapil Sibal, K.T.S Tulsi and Vivek Tankha —to make the claim that the hard disk referred to by the CBI had been tampered with by the agency. The Congress said it is in possession of the genuine data.
The Congress has decided to file a private complaint in a trial court in Bhopal to charge the CBI with manipulating evidence in the case, and ask for the data in its possession to be taken into consideration.
Sibal said that while the CBI claims to have seized the hard disk on July 22, 2013, and sent it to the forensic lab on July 22, 2013, the chain of events proves that the disk was in fact seized on July 17, 2013.
"The reality is that the hard disk was brought to the office of the IG on July 17. It was then brought to Prashant Pandey for opening, and he made a copy of it on his pen drive," Sibal said. He alleged that the hard disk was manipulated between July 17 and 18 to remove the chief minister's name from it.
"We sent the pen drive in which Prashant Pandey (one of the whistleblowers in the case) had copied the hard disk to Truth Labs, Hyderabad, and it gave its report saying it was correct and no tampering was done," he said.
Sibal said the CBI's clean chit to Chouhan was the latest instance of the investigating agency acting on the instructions of the Modi government. “The CBI has a new name now – Compromised Bureau of Investigation,” he said, adding that while the investigating agency is targeting senior leaders of the Congress in various states, it was letting off the hook people who belong to the ruling BJP.
Tulsi, who is one of the lawyers in the case, said , “There has been destruction of evidence in this case to save the CM. Action must be taken to punish the guilty.”
Tankha said the Congress is in possession of all the evidence to prove the chain of events. “From the day on which the hard disk was seized in Bhopal to when it was taken to Indore and when it was brought to Prashant Pandey, we have witnesses to corroborate all this,” he said.
