Till an hour before a Delhi district court remanded Aam Aadmi Party MLA and now former Delhi law minister Jitendra Singh Tomar to four days of police custody on June 9, members of AAP belligerently protested his innocence. By Friday, the party mellowed down considerably, distanced itself from the former minister facing charges of forgery, cheating and criminal conspiracy in allegedly faking his BSc and law degrees, which he used to get enrolled with the Bar Council of Delhi as an advocate. AAP is now seriously considering expelling Tomar.
The party has already left him out in the cold by withdrawing senior advocate and party member HS Phoolka. Tomar will have to now find his own lawyer.
From being steadfast defenders since trouble started brewing in February this year, in a span of a three days, AAP and its chief, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal now choose to portray themselves as victims in Tomar’s considerably long con. News on Friday was flooded with reports on how furious Kejriwal was with his former minister, furious because he too had been taken in by a “fake RTI” that Tomar used to prove his innocence to Kejriwal.
The 49-year-old Fatehpur-born Tomar joined AAP in early September 2013 and saw his star rise considerably in the party. Though he lost the Lok Sabha elections, he won his Vidhan Sabha constituency of Tri Nagar by a considerable margin (nearly 22,000 votes according to AAP leader Sanjay Singh) in the 2015 Assembly elections, and was given the cabinet post of law minister, bypassing other MLAs with a legal background.
Sources told dna that two people knew him well enough to explain both his importance to the party and how he was never suspected by anyone; AAP lawyer Rishikesh Kumar and former AAP MLA Rajesh Garg. A source also said that Prashant Bhushan had previously objected to Tomar being named a candidate for the Assembly elections. He'd asked that his case be looked into by the internal Lokpal, but the objection was ignored by Kejriwal.
While Kumar refused to comment on this issue, Garg recalled how he was acquainted with Tomar when they were both Congress workers. Garg was a Congress activist and Tomar was an officer on special duty for then Congress MLA from Shakur Basti SC Vats, now a BJP leader. Garg says he never trusted the man but did not imagine he had forged his educational qualifications.
Garg says that it was Sanjay Singh who brought Tomar into the party, because a distant relation of Singh’s asked him to. Garg also implied that it was Tomar’s ability to arrange money for the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha campaigns that made him so important to AAP, but could not offer any proof for the same.
However, Garg does tell the tale of New Universal Institute in north-west Delhi’s suburb Rohini. The Institute’s main contact person is listed online as one Indu Gupta, who Garg says is the co-director along with Tomar. Garg says that Gupta herself told him this fact -- “Tomar runs the institute along with me” she apparently said. He says that its advertisements tell people to contact the institute for “BSc, BCom and other courses”.
Garg adds that during his run as an AAP MLA he found out that Tomar had erected structures on the institute's building -- namely a high mass light -- using the MLA funds of Congressman Vats, which legitimately should have been used to work in Vats’ Shakur Basti constituency. Garg says that he has had his doubts about Tomar and the institute’s legitimacy since then. He adds that since Tomar’s arrest, the building has remained locked with the students having no clue why and that Gupta has vanished. dna tried contacting Indu Gupta on the number listed online, but it was turned off.
Garg says that the building is Tomar’s “benami sampatti” and that neighbours in the area have seen Tomar visiting regularly.
“I think it’s not just his own degree but he has made arrangements for degrees for Congressmen and BJP members. AAP took him in because he had been a Congress OSD for years and probably knew trade secrets,” says Garg.
Sanjay Singh, however, says that no one person in the party was approached to bring Tomar into AAP. “Volunteers from Tri Nagar brought him into the party,” Singh explains. He adds that AAP’s protocol is to do a check on a person’s criminal past, character and cases of corruption against them before handing them a ticket. “We did that with Tomar in 2013 and in 2015. All his papers seemed in order. None even thought that a 25-30 year old degree would be fake.”
