Why blame Ashok Khemka? He is not the first...
Ashok Khemka, IAS, has been transferred 46 times in a 22-year career. The reasons for his many transfers ostensibly are because he is an honest and upright officer who does not tolerate corruption. In 2015, in full public and media glare, Ashok Khemka is variously seen as an apostle of integrity, a spanner in the works, a naïve idealist or just a pain in the government machinery who just cant be given an inconsequential enough posting.
Reading and hearing about the travails of Ashok Khemka, I am reminded of Satyapriya Acharya, played by Dharmendra in Hrishekesh Mukherjee’s film Satyakam. Satyapriya is an engineer in government service and he too cannot tolerate corruption. He gets shunted around just like Ashok Khemka, who incidentally is also an engineer (BTech, Computer Science, IIT-Kharagpur). In one scene, Satyapriya’s wife, played by Sharmila Tagore, tells his friend (Sanjeev Kumar) that she no longer unpacks when transferred to a new place because she knows that it is going to be short lived. My guess is Mrs Khemka would surely empathise with Sharmila Tagore’s character in the film.
The film was based on the Bengali novel, Satyakam, written by Narayan Sanyal who was also a civil engineer in the Public Works Department (PWD) in West Bengal. I have heard said that his plot of Satyakam was based on a real life example – possibly someone he came to know when he was a junior engineer in those years just after independence.
In the '90s, I witnessed my very own, albeit minor, Satyakam moment. In 1996, Tabo Monastery in Spiti was celebrating its 1000th year of existence and the Dalai Lama himself was going to be there, performing one of the most sacred rituals of Tibetan Buddhism – the Kalachakra ceremony. Spiti, at that time, was being opened up for visitors and entry regulations had been relaxed. There were four of us, plus Yadav the driver, in an Ambassador that we rented out of Delhi. The car purred its way across the plains and then spluttered and gasped its way up the Himalayas – it took us all of three days to reach Puh in Kinnaur, more than a 100 kilometres short of our destination. Along the way, apart from the fickleness of our travel mode, we also found out that around 30,000 to 35,000 people were headed to Tabo; and when our car limped into Puh after night fall, we felt its implications.
The only place to stay in Puh was the PWD Rest House and it was more than full that night. In the darkness, there was no electricity, there was a crowd of people standing and sitting along the veranda that fronted the Rest House. We met the man in charge – the chowkidar and asked him for help. Tall and thin, the man pointed out a small corner of the veranda that still seemed empty, stating beyond that, there was nothing he could do. On empty stomachs, shivering in the cold of the 8,736 feet altitude night, we resigned ourselves to the uncomfortable hours ahead.
At about 10 pm, we heard the door behind us open - the chowkidar, candle in hand, asked our group to come and sit inside what seemed to be the lounge area of the Rest House. Locking the door again, he put the candle on the centre table and before biding good night, gave us the reason for his change of heart. He could not allow a lady to stay outdoors in the cold all night; my wife was the only woman amongst that miserable lot who were spending their night out in the veranda. The next morning, by the time we got ready, the people in the veranda had cleared out and the chowkidar inquired if we would like some "alu parathas" for breakfast. When the time came for us to leave, the chowkidar presented us with a bill – a mere Rs 40 or 45 for the breakfast we had eaten. I gave him a "hundred" and asked him to keep the change. He gave me a cold look and haughtily replied that being a government servant he did not take "baksheesh", he got paid a salary that he respectably earned and that I had no right to try and "buy" his services because he worked for the government. Chastened and shamed we began to leave. Out of his ear shot, I did enquire of the gardener about this honest government servant.
The man it seemed had been transferred there a few months ago and had since then transformed the Rest House, not only in the way it was maintained but also in the way things were run. I was told that previously it had been mostly used as a place for junior-level officers to come and booze in the evenings, but all that had stopped now.
Exactly a year later, I had the occasion to travel in the region again, and with great hope and expectation of meeting that extraordinary chowkidar, I made my way up to the Rest House. The man had been transferred once again – to some back-of-the-beyond spot where even roads don’t go. I never met him again and to this day, I lament that I did not find out his name, he remains in my mind, "the Chowkidar of Puh".
My whole point in writing this is to say that nothing has changed - in the early 1950s, Narayan Sanyal found his Satyapriya Achariya, in the 1990s I found the "Chowkidar of Puh", who put me in my place and in the 2010s, there is the story of Ashok Khemka. The honest government employee, ever since independence, is always on the move, repeatedly being transferred for having that one ingredient that makes for an irritation in official circles – integrity.
This is an endless cycle, there will be honest men and there will be those who will make them pay for their honesty, Satyapriya Acharya will be remembered in films, Ashok Khemka will be lauded in the media but that Chowkidar of Puh, at the lowest level of Government, will remain unnamed, because even I who admired him, did not have the sense to make a note of his name.