Ahead of Kejriwal's foray into Haryana, buzz back on Ashok Khemka joining AAP

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 13

Ahead of the buoyant Aam Aadmi Party’s electoral foray into Haryana, the buzz about the entry of the 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.

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

The AAP leaders and workers have even started tweeting about the issue.

“Arvind Kejriwal’s college friend and IAS officer Ashok Khemka will be the AAP’s guiding force in Haryana. He will be quitting the IAS to join AAP. The AAP family is expanding,” Indu Gusain, AAP secretary, Delhi unit, tweeted.

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

Sources said things might have changed since then, with the party sweeping Punjab in a massive landslide, a wave that could create ripples in bordering Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.

In 2013, when the 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 in IIT Kharagpur in the 1980s.

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

Khemka has had a chequered bureaucratic career and 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 the AAP’s narrative of clean governance, said party sources.

Haryana has traditionally witnessed a direct contest between the BJP and Congress.

Fits into AAP’s narrative

AAP had first invited Khemka to join its ranks ahead of 2014 Haryana elections, but the bureaucrat had stayed away. Things may have changed after AAP’s Punjab sweep. Khemka, with his anti-corruption stand within the bureaucracy, fits into AAP’s narrative of clean governance

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