Who is Dr Khemka?

Parakram Rautela 
23 October 2012, 09:32 PM IST

The frenzy outside Dr Ashok Khemka's office has dimmed. It is a day after India Against Corruption's allegations against BJP president Nitin Gadkari and for now, every reporter with a video camera is pointed in another direction. 

But Khemka — India's current sweetheart, darling of a nation which has lapped up the story of a crusading officer who has time and time again fought against corruption, and been asked to move along — should be used to the vicissitudes of fortune in public life and, now, living life in public. 

In 2004, when he was director of secondary education, he had refused to transfer teachers who the chief minister's office wanted moved out. Predictably — Khemka is now referred to as "the IAS officer who was transferred 40 times", the last time after he stopped the sale of 3.5 acres of land in Manesar by Robert Vadra to DLF — Khemka himself was transferred. And the car given to him by the government taken away as punishment. So, every working day, Khemka walked the six kilometres to his office. "Chandigarh does not have much of a public transport system," he says by way of explanation. 

[Khemka and his wife Jyoti]

By most accounts, Khemka's adherence to his code of personal honesty has never faltered. Anupam Gupta, a prominent Chandigarh lawyer and friend of Khemka's who is probably most well known today for appearing besides Khemka during some of the officer's TV news appearances, says the IAS man "is one of the most consistently honest officers he has met". 

And that "no government will like him". 

Of course, ask Khemka and he says what any reasonable man would say. "I have never called myself honest." And he adds, "Honest men tend not to achieve very much." 

That was not what his old friends thought he would do. In the paeans now being written about him, a friend of Khemka's from IIT Kharagpur is quoted as saying that he knew Khemka "would change the world"; and farther back from school in St Xavier's, Kolkata, a classmate reports that Khemka once burst into tears because he had scored 99% in a math exam behind another boy who hadn't missed a point. 

Today, it is Khemka's wife Jyoti who does the worrying. Khemka himself only says that his wife and children — his elder son is studying law in Hyderabad, the younger son is in class XI in Chandigarh — "show concern" but the people who know him say Jyoti worries about his safety, especially after Gupta said on national TV that Khemka had been getting threatening phone calls. "And," say the people in the know, "it has been very hard for her to deal with her husband's forty transfers." 

Senior bureaucrats try and explain what might have happened. Every once in a while an officer comes along who insists on keeping his hands clean. Because he will do no wrong whatsoever, and that can stop work in its tracks, his boss moves him along quickly. 

Then again, every now and then an officer comes along who will allow no leeway at all when it comes to interpreting the rules. He too will put a stop to all work, and he too will be shunted along. 

This can be tough on young officers. Having to move families from one remote spot to another, finding schools for their children. But say the bureaucrats, once an officer reaches a rank where he begins serving in the state capital — like Khemka has done, he lives in Chandigarh and works, for now, a few minutes away in Panchkula — then the transfers tend to be somewhat less irksome. 

Has Khemka found himself in this position? Does he have any friends in the service? Again, Khemka smiles and says, "I do not know". 

But he does have friends, many of them. A senior police officer serving in Haryana says that from the closeted security of their living rooms, the men and women of Haryana's IAS and IPS services stand solidly behind Khemka. They believe that what he is doing is right, and that it needs to be done. 

"I have interacted with him," says the cop. "I know his thinking is correct. And personally, I salute his courage." 

Whether any of this will help Khemka is another matter altogether. The police officer adds that under the current dispensation, Khemka will be able to do very little. And that he will be turned into a "social pariah". 

And yet, puzzlingly, Khemka must have foreseen this. Surely, he must have known what was going to happen when he decreed that a business transaction between Robert Vadra — the country's first son-in-law — and DLF was illegal. And why would a man who's bitten his tongue 39 times before finally choose to speak up now? 

One answer lies in the October 13, 2010 amendment to the IAS (fixation of cadre strength) regulations of 1955. That amendment promises all IAS officers in Haryana a minimum tenure of two years. It is possible Khemka thought the amendment would protect him. 

It did not. 

The other answer lies in Khemka's mind. Khemka does not say much about himself, apart from the fact that he "comes from a humble background" — he does not elaborate — and that he "is fortunate to have got into the IAS". 

But the people who know him talk of Khemka's inability to understand — considering his own "humble background" — the actions of the elite, which he used to review in his previous job. "Khemka never quite understood," they say, "why the elite did what they did, acted greedily, when they did not need to." 

And that by the time Khemka realised something was not kosher in the last file he held in his hands in his last job, it was too late. It was, they say, his man-in-the-mirror moment. And when he looked at his reflection, he said to himself it would be weak, at this juncture, to look the other way. 

"The loss is to the state," says Dhirendra Singh, a former union home secretary. "Khemka is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and has a PhD in computer science from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. He is obviously very intelligent and an officer who has shown integrity and probity. Certainly, Haryana can find a better use for him." 

Other bureaucrats wonder whether the Haryana government should be blamed for this final fiasco. They say it says little of Khemka's political masters if they knew of his reputation — "He had been transferred 39 times before" — as a stickler for the rules and still made him director general of land consolidation, an area where anybody who is half awake knows a lot of hocus-pocus goes on. 

"The government," they say, "was simply asking for trouble." 

A shorter version of this article appeared in The Sunday Times of India on October 21