COPY, AND BE JAILED

Local news channels were still discussing the alleged police high-handedness in dealing with violence that had erupted during the student protests against recruitment scams and paper leaks in Uttarakhand when something else came along: an ordinance from Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami with extraordinarily stringent measures to curb cheating during exams.

- Anilesh S. Mahajan

Called the Uttarakhand Competitive Examination (Measures for Prevention and Redressal of Unfair Means in Recruitment) Ordinance, it provides for 10-year jail to those found guilty of copying, and life imprisonment to those facilitating them—a reminder of a similar anti-copying law passed in unified Uttar Pradesh in 1992.

That law had snowballed into a major political issue after then UP CM Kalyan Singh’s regime allowed cops to enter exam halls and arrest students caught cheating. As photos of handcuffed students were flashed in newspapers, the negative public sentiment was exploited by Singh’s rival Mulayam Singh Yadav, who scrapped the law after returning to power in 1993.