Aditi Tandon
New Delhi, March 13
Ahead of the buoyant Aam Aadmi Party’s foray into Haryana, the buzz about the entry of 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.
AAP sources today said Khemka, who has so far maintained a distance from electoral politics, might finally join the Arvind Kejriwal-led outfit and become its principal adviser in election-bound Haryana. The state goes to polls in 2024.
The AAP had first invited Khemka to join its ranks on the eve of 2014 state elections but the bureaucrat had stayed away.
Sources said things have changed hugely since then, with the party sweeping Punjab in a massive landslide—a wave that is bound to create ripples in bordering Haryana and Himachal, all part of joint Punjab before the 1966 reorganisation.
In 2013 when 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 at IIT-Kharagpur in the 1980s.
Kejriwal’s confidante Delhi deputy CM Manish Sisodia had even said on record in 2013, “I personally want Khemka to join the AAP, lead it in Haryana and play an important role.”
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