Honey Tapes Trap Mantris

The MP sleaze scandal grows big as names of prominent politicians, bureaucrats emerge

- Puneet Nicholas Yadav

In July this year, a video clip purportedly showing a top Madhya Pradesh bureaucrat P.C. Meena in a compromising position with a woman went viral across the state’s political, bureaucratic and media circles.

Within days, Meena, a 1984-batch IAS officer serving as the additional chief secretary (general administration) with a year of service left, was shunted out as director of the Tribal Research and Development Institute. The ‘sex video’ sent shock waves across the state’s power corridors and MP chief secretary S.R. Mohanty ordered a probe. Sources tells Outlook that intelligence inputs gathered over the next month suggested that several top-ranking politicians and bureaucrats had similar skeletons in their cupboards but a common link to an organised honey trap racket was still premature to conclude.

On September 17, Harbhajan Singh, an Indore Municipal Corporation officer filed a police complaint of blackmail and extortion against two women, Aarti Dayal (29) and Monica Yadav (18), who had all­egedly threatened to release his smut tape to the press. While Singh was sus­ pended owing to alleged misdemeanor, his complaint set off a domino effect that has now unsettled the entire political and bureaucratic brass of MP.

A total of six people have so far been arrested in the honey trap scandal. Besides Dayal and Yadav, the accused include Shweta Vijay Jain (49), the all­eged kingpin of the racket, Shweta Swapnil Jain (39) and Barkha Soni (34), and their driver Om Prakash Kori (45).

Shweta Vijay Jain was an office-bearer of the BJP’s youth wing till a few years ago. Shweta Swapnil Jain too had BJP connections and, since her arrest, various photo­ graphs of her attending the party’s functions have been in circulation.