Whistleblower IAS officer Ashok Khemka has expressed his displeasure over the Haryana government’s decision to keep him on a lower post despite he being promoted to the rank of principal secretary three months ago.
Khemka is currently looking after the state archaeology and museums department as its director.
“Awaiting posting on promotion for last 3 months. Holding a lower rank post is humiliating. Like a Lt Gen forced to hold post of Brigadier,” Khemka mentioned on his Twitter handle on Wednesday.
On January 1, the Manohar Lal Khattar-led Bharatiya Janata Party government had promoted Khemka along with other IAS officers of the 1991 batch to the higher administrative grade scale in the rank of principal secretary from his previous rank of secretary. But he has not been given the new posting after his promotion.
Expressing his pain, 50-year-old Khemka had also written a letter to chief secretary D S Dhesi on March 9. The IAS officer had mentioned in the letter how the government did not give him a posting as principal secretary asking him “to continue on a lower post in a small directorate”.
“Arbitrary posting lowers the morale and sends a wrong message to honest and sincere officers and employees,” Khemka said in the letter to the chief secretary. The senior bureaucrat had also urged the chief secretary to “restore a modicum of administrative propriety” and not to further delay his posting.
Khemka had grabbed headlines after he cancelled the controversial land deal involving UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra’s firm and real estate giant DLF in 2012.
Haryana government, led by Congress’s Bhupinder Singh Hooda, had chargesheeted him for cancelling the mutation of the land deal. The BJP government on November 4, 2015, dropped the chargesheet paving the way for his promotion.