Former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat announced that he was mulling resignation from two Congress party positions on Thursday, just hours after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) raided the Dehradun residence of his personal assistant, Chandan Singh Jeena, recovering cash, gold jewellery and luxury watches worth more than Rs 1.28 crore.
Following this revelation, Rawat announced he was considering stepping down from his position on the Uttarakhand Pradesh Congress Committee’s executive and as a permanent invitee to the Congress Working Committee at the national level.
The ED conducted searches on September 10 at multiple locations in Dehradun as part of a widening probe into large-scale irregularities in the 2016 Uttarakhand Subordinate Service Selection Commission (UKSSSC) recruitment examination. It was followed up by an FIR, which was filed at a Police station in Dehradun and three subsequent FIRs.
Investigators searched the homes of UKSSSC’s several middlemen allegedly linked to the conspiracy. Jeena- who currently serves as Rawat’s personal assistant and previously held the post of Officer on Special Duty during Rawat’s tenure as Chief Minister from 2009 to 2017- residence was also searched .
According to the ED, OMR answer sheets were secretly moved from the commission’s custody to the then-secretary’s home, where roll numbers of incompletely filled sheets were recorded and passed to computer-agency staff, who fraudulently altered the answer sheets before the sheets were resealed— allegedly in exchange for bribes funneled through middlemen.
At Jeena’s residence, officials say they recovered Rs 32 lakh in unaccounted cash, roughly 200.5 grams of gold in the form of 13 coins and 7 chains, and 12 luxury watches from brands including Rolex, Rado, Piaget, Movado, Tissot and Casio Edifice. Bank accounts belonging to Jeena and his family members, holding a combined balance of over Rs 52 lakh, were frozen under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
Reacting to the raids, Rawat wrote on social media that he had learned of the recoveries from television reports and that the full facts would emerge over time. He described Jeena as a decent, humble and hardworking person, but said that if evidence proved Jeena had tampered with OMR sheets, he would be ashamed of such conduct— while adding that he did not personally believe the allegations.
Rawat linked the timing to the political stakes ahead of Uttarakhand’s assembly elections, recalling that he used to joke the polls would arrive once the CBI came knocking at his door. This time, he said, agencies had gone to a colleague’s home instead, in what he described as an attempt to build a narrative. He argued that the Congress party and its workers were mobilised against corruption, pointing to Rahul Gandhi’s national “Chhatron Ki Goonj” campaign against corruption in the education system, and said he did not want any of his own conduct to weaken that fight.
Calling irregularities in recruitment and examinations a betrayal of the state’s younger generation, Rawat said that if any action of his had harmed the prospects of Uttarakhand’s youth, he considered himself deserving of harsh criticism.