Just Transferred: The Untold Story of Ashok Khemka

By Bhavdeep Kang and Namita Kala

Twenty-seven years in service and fifty-three transfers: that's an average of six months in each posting. Meet the forever-in-transit man of the Indian bureaucracy, Ashok Khemka. The IAS officer shot into the limelight in 2012, when he cancelled the mutation of a land deal between realty major DLF and a company which belonged to Congress president Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law Robert Vadra. With the Congress party in power, most people called it a suicidal move. But, true to his reputation for being scrupulously honest, Khemka didn't budge. Throughout his career, Khemka has suffered at the hands of his political masters for his refusal to compromise. Be it being stripped of his official car for defying a chief minister, or being charge-sheeted for frivolous reasons, the actions of those with vested interests have not been able to shake his indomitable spirit. Why has the man never given up against a 'system' that always tends to go with the flow? Why do political parties use Khemka's example to score brownie points during elections and conveniently forget the man afterwards? Why are there just admirers and no takers for the officer when it comes to his deputation with the central government? And, most importantly, will honest officers like Ashok Khemka continue to suffer under successive regimes?Offering an insider's view of India's administrative machinery, Just Transferred is the riveting story of a man whose example may well become an inspiration to civil servants across the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9789353576639

Bhavdeep Kang

BHAVDEEP KANG is a journalist of thirty-three years' standing. She has worked with the Times of India, the Sunday Observer, the Indian Express, the Pioneer, the Telegraph, Outlook and India Today. She is a freelance columnist and lives in Delhi. NAMITA KALA is a freelance editor and former reporter. She has worked with the Indian Express and the Pioneer and has written extensively on politics and the environment. She divides her time between Delhi and Dehradun.

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Prologue

IT WAS AN ORDINARY October day in New Delhi, not quite warm and not quite cold. Busy pedestrians went about their business, traffic hummed as usual and pigeons billed and cooed on the crowded streets. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that a momentous event was about to take place. Although there were the odd clues. Strong undercurrents of public anger brewed beneath the surface. The atmosphere in the national capital and across large tracts of the countryside was politically charged and the mood was distinctly anti-corruption.

Barely a stone’s throw away from the Indian parliament, right at the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi, a press conference was underway at Vithalbhai Patel House. It was 5 October 2012. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was midway into its second term and a series of scams had already left its image more than a little bedraggled. Arvind Kejriwal, then an anti-corruption activist, was about to drive home the last nail into the government’s coffin. He began to speak.

Kejriwal normally made great copy, so the room was jam-packed with scribes on the hunt for a story. He was dressed in a light-blue shirt, with the usual white cap adorning his head. It was part of the ensemble that members of the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement wore with a jaunty air, to declare their identity and announce their opposition to the corruption that was rife under UPA II. He opened his attack with a bald announcement: ‘We will talk about Sonia Gandhi’s son-in law Robert Vadhera.’ (He pronounced Vadra as Va-deh-ra.)

Kejriwal went on to expose Vadra’s land dealings. He claimed that Vadra had acquired property worth ₹300 crore through an investment of just ₹50 lakh, over a space of three years.¹ Kejriwal would later launch his own party (the Aam Aadmi Party) and go on to become Chief Minister of Delhi.

Activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan was seated beside Kejriwal. His father, former Union Law Minister Shanti Bhushan, was also on the dais, lending gravitas to the proceedings. They were both minus the white caps. Kejriwal announced that DLF (Delhi Land and Finance) had given Vadra an unsecured, interest-free loan of ₹65 crore. A loan he had then used to purchase property from DLF itself. ‘Why? What did they gain? Sochnay waali baat hai (It’s something to think about),’ he added.

The younger Bhushan cited papers available on the website of the Registrar of Companies, which revealed that Vadra had purchased properties from DLF over a period of three years through five companies using the seed money that had been extended to him by DLF itself. The companies were owned by Vadra and his mother. In all, he had registered 12 companies, six of them in 2012.

This event was followed closely in an unpretentious flat in a quiet corner of Chandigarh. Ashok Khemka, a Haryana cadre officer from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), watched replays of the press meet on news channels that evening. Khemka’s interest was piqued when Bhushan began detailing the properties purchased by Vadra from DLF at what appeared to be throwaway prices. Vadra had picked up:

A plot for ₹1 crore in Delhi’s upmarket Greater Kailash.

A half-share in the five-star Hilton hotel in Saket.

Seven flats in the uber-luxurious Magnolia complex in Gurgaon for just ₹5.2 crore (working out to ₹74 lakh per flat, at a time, said Bhushan, when each flat was valued at ₹5 crore).

Land in Bikaner, Palwal, Mewat, Manesar and Gurgaon.

Prashant Bhushan asked for a ‘fair’ probe into Vadra’s deals and hinted at a quid pro quo. Journalists—and the viewers—were left with a feeling that there was much more to Vadra’s real estate ventures than met the eye. After all, why would DLF oblige Vadra unless it had something to gain from him?

A news portal cheekily pointed out that DLF, while disbursing interest-free loans, was paying high rates of interest on its own debts. During an in-house presentation on 6 August 2012, DLF had admitted to a gross debt of ₹25,060 crore, and confessed that ‘the company’s borrowings from banks and others have an effective weighted average rate of 12.38 per cent per annum’.²

In a press statement issued two days later, DLF admitted to giving ₹65 crore in ‘business advances’ to Vadra, of which ₹15 crore was refunded and ₹50 crore was used towards the purchase of land. DLF vehemently denied selling property to Vadra’s companies at prices below those offered to other customers, or any quid pro quo in its transactions with him.³

Khemka was not aware that Vadra’s emergence as a property dealer par excellence had already been red-flagged by a pink paper.⁴ In March 2011, the Economic Times reported: ‘DLF has also extended loans to various companies owned by Vadra. Some of these are unsecured loans or debt without any collateral.’ The news item quoted Vadra as saying, ‘I have known the DLF people for a long time and they are friends of mine. I had wanted to invest in real estate and one thing led to another.’⁵

DLF is a listed company, so the ‘DLF people’—Vadra presumably meant K.P. Singh and his family—could not have treated it as their private dominion. So what motivated the sweetheart deals with Vadra? The question hung in the air.

Newspapers started probing the business relationship between DLF and Vadra and discovered that Vadra had started with funds of ₹50 lakh in 2007–08 and by 2010 acquired at least 29 high-value properties, thanks to loans and advances received from DLF.

As Bhushan had mentioned, DLF had also entered into a hotel joint venture with Vadra, giving him a 50 per cent stake in Saket Courtyard Hospitality, which owned The Hilton, for a sum of ₹35 crore. This was given to him as ‘an unsecured loan’ in October 2009, stated the Economic Times. DLF had also negotiated with Vadra for the purchase of land he held in Amipur in Faridabad. DLF admitted (to the Indian Express) that it had paid Vadra ₹15 crore as an advance against the purchase of land, but found ‘legal infirmities in the land parcel’ and did not go ahead with the deal.

Prima facie, Vadra had done nothing wrong. He had received loans on ridiculously favourable terms. He had charmed his creditor into giving him amazing deals and had profited hugely, which argued extraordinary business acumen on his part. However, Vadra was about to discover, at great cost to his reputation, that the wag who said, ‘all sins are forgiven once you start making a lot of money’, was at least partly wrong. The best example of what former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha would dub as the ‘Vadra model of business’ was still to catch the public eye.

It came into national focus ten days later, when Khemka cancelled the mutation of the now infamous Vadra–DLF deal in Gurgaon’s Shikohpur village. With one stroke of his pen Khemka made history and placed himself squarely on a collision course with his chief minister and the entire might of the state machinery.

Six years later, with the benefit of hindsight, an inescapable conclusion that stares one in the face is that while political scandals make for good public theatre, they have a half-life directly proportional to the profile of the principle players. The Vadra–DLF story owes its longevity to the former’s status as prince consort. It has made him something of a golden goose for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), yielding electoral gold, time after time. But this is not Vadra’s story, although, like the other prominent personalities who people its pages, he has a small part to play.

This story belongs to an ordinary citizen made extraordinary by circumstances. It is a record of Ashok Khemka’s rocky journey from unknown mandarin to hero extraordinaire. He caught the nation’s attention when a series of events unwittingly hurtled him down the path that led him into direct confrontation with the country’s power elite. He won the battle and altered the course of politics in India, inadvertently paving the way for the political right to assume power under its own steam for the first time in independent India.

But he achieved all this at great personal cost. He was hounded, vilified, threatened and finally punished with exile to inconsequential postings so that the ‘interests’ of the political class could be safeguarded from his laser eyes. This last has remained a constant throughout the course of his career as a civil servant, spanning twenty-seven years.

Governments have come and gone but their attitude towards Khemka has remained the same, party affiliations and political ideologies notwithstanding. All the five chief ministers he has served have regarded him as a nuisance and a threat to their governments and each has used every possible means at his disposal to bring Khemka to heel—without much success. Because Khemka is that rare breed of man who does not bend or edit his conscience to serve any master; rather, he follows its dictates obsessively, even at great personal cost.

1

The Outsider

‘CORRUPTION WAS NOT SUCH an evil in the environment that I grew up in.’

Coming from Ashok Khemka, the anti-corruption icon, this is a startling admission. Tempting though it is to infer that his whole life has been a continuum of rebellion against the amorality of his milieu, it would be too simplistic a reading of so complex a man. Freud remarked: ‘We are what we are because we have been what we have been.’⁶ In other words, an individual is the sum total of his experiences.

So it is with Khemka and to understand him, we must go back to the beginning to a charitable nursing home in the erstwhile Calcutta (now Kolkata), where Ashok Khemka was born in the early hours of 30 April 1965. Matri Mangal Sewa Sadan, on Chitpur road, was frequented by the less affluent members of Kolkata’s Marwari community. It was a short distance away from the unpretentious locality where his parents lived. His family’s impoverished circumstances belied their Marwari surname, which the Bengalis equated with great wealth.

Like the bulk of the Marwari diaspora, Khemka’s roots can be traced back to Rajasthan. His grandfather Sri Lal Khemka had migrated from Bissau in Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan to Bhagalpur in Bihar and then moved on to Kolkata, where he established a successful business in commodities and transport. He traded primarily in food grains in a Bengal that was still undivided.

Ashok Khemka’s father, Shankar Lal Khemka, was born in 1925, the youngest of six siblings—two brothers and three sisters preceded him. Shankar Lal was orphaned while still a toddler and given into the care of his oldest brother, Dwarka Prasad, who was already married. His wife, Ginni, was a formidable woman, a trait which seemed to persist into old age. After Ashok Khemka joined the civil service and got married, he took his wife Jyoti for her blessings. He was taken aback when Ginni said, ‘Ashok, tu to bada afsar ban gayo hain (you have become a big officer).’

Ginni had no desire to act as de facto mother to the orphaned Shankar. The family saw no reason to invest in his education, despite his obvious intelligence; as a result his formal schooling came to a premature end. However, it was important in Marwari circles that the family was seen to be doing its duty by him, so they arranged a match for him. It was unsuccessful, so Shankar’s siblings arranged a second marriage. Finding a bride was by no means easy, despite his family’s social standing. After all, he was bow-legged, in his late thirties and not in the best of health.

The second bride hunt ended with Ashok Khemka’s mother, Savitri Devi. Her family was from Farukkhabad in Uttar Pradesh. Pretty, hard-working and accomplished, she had not had an easy time of it in her maternal home. Her mother, being an active member of a satsang (prayer group) had a hectic social life, so the care of the large household fell on Savitri’s young shoulders. Her education had ended abruptly after middle school because she was far more useful at home being the eldest of the unmarried daughters. There were a dozen or so members in the family for whom meals had to be cooked and a house that needed managing. The family was in financial difficulties at the time of the marriage.

Savitri was bedridden when we met her, but beneath the layers of time and suffering, traces of her youthful beauty were still discernible. She summed up the circumstances of her marriage in a single sentence. ‘My parents did not have the money and his family did not want any money.’ She was nineteen years old at the time and the marriage heralded the death of her dreams and aspirations. She was good at maths, drawing and embroidery. She had wanted to study further, or at the very least, marry a young well-educated prince. A good singer and a deft needlewoman, she would later say with palpable regret that she could have studied more had circumstances been less dire. But her family was poor and eked out a living from a small shop in a small town. Like many other girls of her generation, her life was not her own.

Khemka remarks with a fond smile: ‘She never stopped defending her family.’ She always insisted that her father was a good man who had been physically incapacitated and so the burden of her marriage had fallen on her brother. She continued to stand up for her father till the day he passed away in 1975 and never thought or spoke ill of him.

Savitri’s new family in Kolkata came as a shock. Her husband, whom she had not set eyes on before marriage, was sixteen years older than her. What’s more, he was quite impoverished. After the wedding, they moved into a small rented room. Later, they shifted to a tiny independent flat on B.K. Paul Avenue, also on lease. Ashok was the middle child, sandwiched between two sisters—Alka, a year older than him, and Rakhi, over four years younger than him.

His father’s oldest sister had been married into one of Kolkata’s wealthiest families. By the time he was born, she had already borne three children. Widowed before Ashok Khemka’s birth, she was the family matriarch. Her family owned an edible oil refinery in the city, where Khemka’s father had been given a low-end clerical job and a meagre salary to help him support his family.

Ashok Khemka has fond recollections of his father’s workplace. ‘My father would sometimes take me to the edible oil factory where he worked. It belonged to my bua (paternal aunt/father’s sister) who was like a grandmother to me. I did not feel like the son of an employee at the factory, I felt like a relative of the owner.’

His mother Savitri, on the other hand, found herself in an untenable situation, stranded on an island of poverty in the midst of wealth. She spoke Hindi and not the Marwari dialect and could afford only the simplest of clothes. She was the perpetual outsider, unable to blend into the family. On social occasions, her status as a poor relation rankled.

She was never able to reconcile herself to the hand fate had dealt her and being a determined soul, she did more than just complain. Khemka remembers her labouring over her needlework for hours on end and going house-to-house to sell saris and the piece-work that she undertook to augment the family income.

In Jyoti Khemka’s assessment, her mother-in-law adapted to survive in what must have been a very trying environment. She worked hard, turned a bit fierce and without meaning to, ‘ended up placing the entire burden of her deprivations on Ashok’s shoulders’. The son became the repository of his parents’ hopes and dreams.

It was in this Dickensian environment of poverty and deprivation that Ashok Khemka spent most of his childhood.

Educating Ashok

Carl Jung observed: ‘In every adult there lurks a child—an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.’⁷ The little world of childhood, he explained, is a model of the greater world. ‘The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life.’

Ashok Khemka belonged neither to the world he was born into, nor the world his parents aspired for him. He was aware from a very young age, that he would be living out the unlived dreams of his parents. ‘As a child there was a great expectation from me within the family. It was the typical kind of expectation. I was expected to shoulder the responsibility of my sisters and take care of the family—I was to be a kind of a gatherer of resources.’

Nothing tangible was ever said or done to foster this impression, but he carried its imprint far beyond his childhood. One individual stands out in his memory in this context, a purchase manager who worked with the Birla Corporation. He was a wheeler-dealer, known for cutting shady deals and making money through questionable means, but this did not discredit him. The entire para (neighbourhood) would turn out to gawk at his gleaming Ambassador whenever he drove in to visit his in-laws. The man was fawned upon.

‘Everyone knew how he made his money, but it seemed to be a secondary issue. I found this attitude puzzling and throughout my childhood I never found the answer. Yet it was a question that kept haunting me—why were his ill-gotten riches not regarded with disgust by society? After all he was cheating someone.’ It was at this point that his aversion to corruption was born. ‘I was different,’ recalls Khemka, ‘survival was enough and money didn’t matter beyond survival needs. To go by foot and save money on the bus/tram fare was satisfying.’ He could not understand the ubiquitous yearning for wealth around him.

His mother used to fondly call him a Jain muni, a doting reference to his strong streak of self-abnegation. ‘He was not fond of the cinema, he did not care about clothes or shoes. He wore whatever we gave him. He preferred to take money from us instead of ice-creams, and even that he would not spend.’

Having spent his initial years in a Bengali neighbourhood, Ashok Khemka became as fluent in the language as any native speaker. When he turned seven, his father took him to the city’s top school for boys, St. Xavier’s Collegiate School. His parents had their differences, but where their son was concerned, they were united in their determination to give him the best education possible.

The admission interview is etched in Khemka’s mind. He remembers the principal, the imposing Father Vetticad, seated behind a vast desk, and his father standing before it, his hands folded in supplication. The Jesuit priest seemed formidable. He was tall, dark, thick-nosed and broad, his white soutane contrasting sharply with his complexion. But when he turned his bespectacled gaze on the small boy and spoke, his voice was soft and reassuring. He addressed him as ‘child’ and asked him to spell ‘cheerful’. The boy complied. ‘I could not converse in English in those days. But I was good at grammar and spellings. So I was grateful that they asked me to spell a word that I knew,’ recalls Khemka.

Another gentleman handed him a book in Hindi and asked him to read from it. ‘That was a breeze, because I was good at Hindi.’

‘Moti mera kutta hai. Moti bahut pyaara hai (Moti is my dog. Moti is very lovable),’ he rattled off.

He was then asked to solve a few sums orally, which he did with aplomb. ‘I was good at maths, so it was not a problem.’ The principal and teachers wore expressions of approval, but his father’s tension did not abate. The tricky part was yet to come. Shankar Lal folded his hands once again and said, ‘Aamaar mayene dewar shamartho neyi (I cannot afford the fees).’

Without a word, the principal scribbled in the margins of the fee book: ‘To pay ₹10 per month.’ This was a substantial concession as the full fee in 1973 was ₹35 per month. Son in tow, Shankar marched off to the Syndicate Bank branch on the school premises and deposited a grand sum of ₹120, which represented the school fees for the entire year. He wanted to ensure that the fee was never late or unpaid. ‘Never keep your debts, he would say,’ recalls Khemka. It was another childhood lesson that would make a lasting impact.

The first of Shankar’s ambitions for his son had been fulfilled. It was a bold step. Khemka speculates that his father, denied an education himself, wanted to put his own son on equal footing with the best. Despite his lack of formal schooling, Shankar was good at maths and grammar and had excellent handwriting, qualities that he would pass on to his son and his younger grandson, Ganesh.

Shankar’s wealthy older sister had given up her middle son for adoption to another rich Marwari family. That son was the same age as Shankar and had a family of his own. His son attended Xavier’s and was best friends with the son of West Bengal’s most influential official—an intimate of the chief minister, courted by industrialists and politicians alike. So powerful was he that the SHO of Park Street police station, with Xavier’s in its precincts, made it a point to salute his son. The power of the bureaucrat-politician-industrialist nexus made a deep impression on Khemka at a very early age.

Ashok was thrust into an alien world that promised a better life, but condemned him to an inner exile. He no longer belonged to his parents’ milieu, nor did he fit in at school.

Xavier’s was the educational arcadia of Kolkata’s elite; everyone spoke English. Young Khemka did not speak the language. He spoke Hindi at home (his father had not taught him the Marwari dialect) and Bengali outside and struggled to communicate with his teachers and peers