On Thursday Ashok Khemka tweeted, “Tried hard to address corruption and bring reforms in Transport despite severe limitations and entrenched interests. Moment is truly painful.” The tweet was retweeted over 3000 times within hours and received a number of comments. It is indeed a painful moment for the IAS officer of the Haryana cadre who in 22 years has been transferred 46 times. And why? Because he has exposed corruption in every department he was transferred to. It is also a painful moment for the honest people in this country, especially those in the bureaucracy, for this is an example of how the government and politicians treat whistleblowers and the honest officers.
Khemka’s first brush with fame was when he dared to question Robert Vadra’s land deals in Haryana. And who is Vadra? The son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. At the time Khemka took on Vadra, there was a Congress government at the Centre and in the State. Khemka dared to expose Vadra and did not last for long in the post. He was transferred and also received death threats and faced an enquiry commission that tried to nail him. The then Congress government in Haryana had given Vadra a clean chit in the case.
Just a few days before the latest transfer Khemka had tweeted: “My action in Vadra-DLF land-license deal vindicated in CAG report, but continue to suffer the stigma of charge sheet.” The CAG report that was tabled in the Haryana Assembly last month confirmed that Vadra gained from land licences and that the State government had made huge losses because of the manner in which the licences were sold, supporting Khemka’s observations in the case. Khemka, instead of being exonerated, has been transferred again.
But now, there is neither a Congress government at the Centre nor in Haryana, yet Khemka has not been left in peace to function in the department he has been posted to and the government says the transfer was routine. He was transferred just four months after being appointed as the State Transport Commissioner and sent to a low-profile post of Secretary, Archaeology and Museums Department and Director General, Archaeology and Museums. To this somebody tweeted on Khemka’s page saying, “Honest bureaucrats in India are worth keeping in museums only.”
If museums are the repository of honesty in the country today, then the country has taken a huge step backwards, rather than forward. By these transfers it is the moral fabric of the polity that stands exposed, not just in Haryana but all over the country. Honesty in the bureaucracy today appears to be so rare that when one such officer is sighted, he cannot be allowed to function. Khemka is not the first whistleblower officer to be victimised. Khmeka has been transferred and chargesheeted but others have fared far worse. In 2003, Satyendra Dubey, a 30-year-old Indian Engineering Service officer was killed after fighting corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral construction project. Last month, a young Karnataka IAS officer D K Ravi was found hanging in his official residence and his colleagues have claimed that Ravi was a very honest officer. He had allegedly been threatened and pressurized by ‘powerful people’ before his suicide.
Corruption has pervaded the administration and governments across the country in such a manner that the cleansing will not be easy. As Khemka himself has tweeted, “Corruption is an expression of power; unfair and de-humanising to its victim.” That it indeed is. However much governments and political parties will talk about taking on the corrupt, the cleansing is never done. Take Goa for instance, the BJP came to power here on the plank of ‘zero tolerance to corruption’, but the former chief minister did admit that the monster continued to exist in the State. Perhaps if Haryana does not want Khemka, then Goa can invite the IAS officer to join the Goa services.
The country needs IAS officers of the calibre of Khemka, bureaucrats who will not allow any obstacles to deter them from the single-minded quest to root out corruption in the departments they have been posted to. Instead of promoting such bureaucrats, that governments place hurdles in their paths, indicates that we are living in a time when honesty does not get rewarded. That is sad, for when honesty is thrown out the window at the highest level, there is little that can be expected from the lower bureaucracy.
