Going on 41

The world knows Ashok Khemka as the bureaucrat who has been transferred too many times to remember. But what do family and friends have to say about his troubleshooting ways? Sunday Times visits him in Chandigarh to find out more about the man behind the news
The frenzy outside 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 — 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.
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 himself was transferred. He 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. This was when the car given to him by the government was also 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.
By most accounts, Khemka’s adherence to his code of personal honesty has never faltered. Anupam Gupta, his friend and a prominent Chandigarh lawyer, says the IAS man “is one of the most consistently honest officers he has met”. He also adds that “no government will like him”.
Of course, ask Khemka that and he says matter-of-factly , “I have never called myself honest.” And then goes on to add, almost as an after-thought , “Honest men tend not to achieve very much.”
But for his friends, he was always an achiever. In the paeans now being written about him, one of his friends from IIT Kharagpur is quoted as saying that he knew Khemka “would change the world” ; and a classmate from his school — St Xavier’s , Kolkata — 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.
However, today, it is Khemka’s wife who does the worrying. Khemka himself only says that his wife and children “show concern” but the people who know him say she worries about his safety, especially after Gupta said on national TV that Khemka had been receiving 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.
The constant transfers, the bureaucrats point out, can indeed be tough, especially for young officers who have to move families from one remote spot to another and find 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, the 1991-batch officer 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 officer. “I know his thinking is correct. And personally, I salute his courage.”
But whether any of this will help Khemka is another matter altogether. The cop adds that under the current dispensation, Khemka will be able to do very little. And that he will be turned into a “social pariah” . “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 itself should be blamed for this fiasco. They say it says little of Khemka’s political masters if they knew of his reputation — 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.”