Did not go to court when faced with your wrath, tweets Khemka

Chandigarh: A day after the Punjab and Haryana high court summoned complete records on the Dhingra Commission, following a petition by former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda challenging the panel’s constitutional validity, whistleblower IAS officer Ashok Khemka on Thursday tweeted that he “did not go to court when faced with your wrath for exposing license blackmarketing & land scams”.
The 1991 batch IAS officer did not mention Hooda’s name in the tweet but it was clear who the target of his sarcastic remark was. Khemka had not only faced a chargesheet in connection with cancelling the mutation of land deal between UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra’s company and real estate giant DLF but the state Congress government had even launched many inquiries against him in connection with different matters.
“Duty & truth conquered my fear and greed,” tweeted Khemka on Thursday. In October 2012, he had cancelled the mutation of the controversial land deal on the ground that the assistant consolidation officer, who had sanctioned the change of title in the revenue record in favour of DLF, was not competent to do so.
However, the then Congress government had chargesheeted Khemka accusing him of “administrative misconduct for overstepping jurisdiction” in passing orders to cancel the mutation of 3.5 acre land in Gurgaon’s Shikohpur village. However, the officer had alleged that he was victimized for exposing murky land deals.
In 2015, Haryana’s BJP government had set up Justice S N Dhingra commission to probe the grant of commercial licences to private companies, including Vadra’s Skylight Hospitality. Hooda had challenged the panel’s constitutional validity, adding that the orders to set it up were taken by chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar on May 13, 2015 at his own instance. He said the orders were “prompted solely by malice, and to pursue his party’s political vendetta, with a clear intention of portraying him (Hooda) in bad light”.
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Chargesheet withdrawn, but committee report indicting Khemka still stands valid
Soon after Khemka had cancelled the mutation of Vadra land deal in 2012, the then Hooda-led government had formed a committee of three IAS officers to probe into the issues raised by him (Khemka). The committee had given a clean chit to Vadra’s firm Skylight Hospitality while indicting Khemka for “wrongly” cancelling the mutation of land deal.
Khemka has been stating that the committee never gave him a chance to give his point of view in the matter. Ahead of 2014 Lok Sabha and Haryana assembly polls, BJP had raised the Vadra land deal issue very prominently The saffron party came into power in Haryana more than two years back but the report of the committee still stands valid as the current BJP government has not annuled it as of now. However, in 2015, the government withdrew the chargesheet issued against Khemka by the previous government.