Ahead of Kejriwal's Haryana forays, buzz back about whistleblower IAS officer Ashok Khemka joining AAP

Tribune News Service

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, March 13

Ahead of the buoyant Aam Aadmi Party’s foray into Haryana, the buzz about the entry of whistleblower bureaucrat Ashok Khemka into the party fold is back.

Khemka, the 1991-batch IAS officer, who has faced 54 transfers in his 30-year long bureaucratic career, has long been wooed by the AAP.

AAP sources today said Khemka, who has so far maintained a distance from electoral politics, might finally join the Arvind Kejriwal-led outfit and become its principal adviser in election-bound Haryana. The state goes to polls in 2024.

The AAP had first invited Khemka to join its ranks on the eve of 2014 state elections but the bureaucrat had stayed away.

Sources said things have changed hugely since then, with the party sweeping Punjab in a massive landslide—a wave that is bound to create ripples in bordering Haryana and Himachal, all part of joint Punjab before the 1966 reorganisation.

In 2013 when AAP invited Khemka into the party, it was widely speculated that Kejriwal wanted to project the IAS officer as the party’s CM face in Haryana.

Khemka and Kejriwal go back a long way and studied together at IIT-Kharagpur in the 1980s.

Kejriwal’s confidante Delhi deputy CM Manish Sisodia had even said on record in 2013, “I personally want Khemka to join the AAP, lead it in Haryana and play an important role.”

Khemka rose to fame when he was chargesheeted for “administrative misconduct” upon cancelling the mutation of a land deal involving Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son in law Robert Vadra and DLF bosses.

Khemka, with his anti-corruption stand within the bureaucracy, fits into AAP’s narrative of clean governance, said party sources.

The buzz about Khemka’s eventual entry into the AAP became stronger with Indu Gusain, AAP secretary, Delhi unit, on Saturday tweeting: “Arvind Kejriwal’s college friend and IAS officer Ashok Khemka, who has been transferred 54 times in his 30 year career, will be AAP’s guiding force in Haryana. He will be quitting the IAS to join AAP. The AAP family is expanding.”

Khemka had recently proposed changes to the Personnel MInistry’s IAS cadre rules suggesting, “The empanelment guidelines should be removed. They create an artificial barrier restricting the choice of the Central Government to choose from a larger pool of officers. More officers want to serve at the Centre, but are excluded.”

Haryana has traditionally witnessed a direct contest between the BJP and Congress. AAP’s emergence could spoil the Congress applecart, with AAP leaders openly proclaiming to replace the Congress as the principal opposition to the BJP.

The AAP has already announced intentions to contest Himachal, Haryana and Gujarat Assembly elections and plans to expand its membership across south India starting April 16, the birthday of Dr BR Ambedkar.

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