Ashok Khemka

Ashok Khemka has never been this inactive. These days he spends most of his time reading newspapers or tutoring his two teenage sons at his official residence in Chandigarh. After being removed from the post of the inspector general of registration, Haryana government, for ordering a probe into the land dealings of Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra, Khemka, 47, has been put in charge of the low profile Seed Development Corporation and has little to do.

“It’s unfortunate that I’ve been transferred just for doing my duty,” says Khemka, a 1991 batch IAS officer.

A new broom is sweeping across India, seeking to unearth the dirt that’s hiding in every corner. Khemka is one of the men and women who have been taking on the mighty, often at the threat of their lives.

Mumbai’s Simpreet Singh, too, has been living with threats. Singh, 32, along with a few others exposed a high-level rip-off that’s come to be known as the Adarsh scam. They brought to light the fact that top politicians, bureaucrats and defence personnel wangled flats in Mumbai’s residential tower, Adarsh Co-operative Housing Society, that were meant for serving and retired defence personnel.

“Even though a lot of people have got away, the fact that a former chief minister lost his job is some consolation,” Singh says. Ashok Chavan of the Congress was forced to resign as Maharashtra’s chief minister after he was named by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the scam.

In a country like India, where a chalta hai attitude has often pulled a veil over injustice and corruption, what’s it that provokes ordinary people to take on political bigwigs?

For some, it’s a passion for justice. For a few, the crusade is personal. And for many, it’s frustration.

Bharat Sinh Jhala

“Common people are frustrated with the corrupt system. It is this frustration that forces them to fight the system,” stresses Santosh Hegde, former Karnataka Lokayukta who exposed irregularities in the mines of Bellary.

Singh was egged on by the death of a six-year-old in Mumbai. The engineer was shattered when the girl died in a police lathicharge on protestors whose houses had been razed in a demolition drive in 2005. “It strengthened my resolve to work among the poor,” he says.

Pravin Wategaonkar was among those who felt corruption in the government had to be tackled. “The 2G scam was the trigger,” he says. “I was upset at what was happening and when Adarsh broke out, I was very angry.”

When he realised that several aspects of the scam, involving illegal transactions, were not being pursued, he filed a petition in May 2011. Skeletons soon came tumbling out of government closets.

Not all activists have exposed scams as headline-hogging as the Adarsh deal. But scores of corrupt acts are now under the scanner because of the relentless missions of people like Amit Kumar of Bihar’s East Champaran district. Kumar’s efforts led to the discovery that the state government had diverted Rs 41.99 crore issued by the Union human resources development (HRD) ministry for non-formal education. After the expose, the HRD ministry asked the Bihar government to return the money with interest.

From Bihar to Haryana, Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat to Jharkhand, and Bengal to Karnataka, such irregularities are now being routinely exposed. Take Prashant Kumar Dubey of Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh. In 2008, he exposed the deaths of children due to malnutrition with the help of a Right to Information (RTI) application. Or take Bharat Sinh Jhala of Ahmedabad who took up the cause of farmers. A series of RTI applications he filed in 2009 proved that more farmers in Gujarat had committed suicide than officially declared.

“In reply to my RTI application, the state also admitted that it had rejected a large number of insurance claims made by farmers and intended beneficiaries,” says Jhala, now a full-time activist after being laid off as a contractual labourer in an MNC.

Amit Kumar

The push for justice has been buoyed by the Right to Information Act of 2005. Information that was earlier closely guarded by government departments can now be in the public domain. “People always knew that they had to raise their voice against corruption. But till the RTI came into place, they didn’t know how to do it,” Hegde holds.

Kumar used the RTI Act as a tool. “My father used to work in the department of adult and informal education in Bihar. He was denied many of his entitlements for ‘shortage of funds’. After his death in 2004, I shot off an RTI application to the Prime Minister’s Office seeking information,” he says. After the ministry discovered the money was diverted for other purposes, it asked the Bihar government to return the money.

Not every whistleblower meets with success, however. Satyendra Dubey, a project director at the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), was murdered in Gaya, Bihar, in 2003, days after he wrote a letter to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, exposing corruption in a highway construction project.

In 2005, Shanmugam Manjunath, an Indian Oil Corporation officer, was killed in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri while trying to expose a nexus between officials and criminals in the allocation of petrol pumps. Satish Shetty, an RTI activist from Pune who took on the builder mafia, was stabbed to death in January 2010. Last year, wildlife activist Shehla Masood was shot dead in Bhopal.

Hegde believes that the government has to safeguard whistleblowers. The Whistleblowers’ Protection Bill, introduced in 2011, is awaiting the approval of the Rajya Sabha. But some fear that the law is harsher on whistleblowers than it is on those who victimise them.

According to the bill, if a public authority is found to be victimising a whistleblower, the penalty is Rs 30,000. But the penalty for making a false or misleading disclosure is imprisonment of two years plus a fine of up to Rs 30,000,” says Kaushiki Sanyal, senior analyst at Delhi-based research body PRS Legislative Research.

Sanyal adds that the other drawback is the bill doesn’t allow anonymous complaints. “It also does not have any provision for witness protection as recommended by the law commission,” she says.

Not surprisingly, whistleblowers have taken it upon themselves to create a safer environment. The Movement Against Intimidation, Threats and Revenge Against Activists (Mitra), started by activists in Mumbai, seeks to help whistleblowers in distress.

“If any whistleblower in Maharashtra is threatened for his or her activism, we file a complaint with the police. In some cases, we also persuade government officials to take up a case,” says Mitra convener Sumaira Abdulali, who herself was attacked by goons for fighting illegal sand mining in Maharashtra.

But for some whistleblowers, threats make no difference. Professor Rajeev Kumar of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, was suspended in 2011 for exposing discrepancies in admission procedures.

“Despite his suspension and also stiff resistance from the IITs, he has filed at least 50 RTI applications seeking transparency in the education system,” says Kumar’s lawyer Pranav Sachdev.

Like Kumar, Khemka too seems to be unmoved by the numerous transfers that the government has punished him with. “I will continue to raise my voice against any wrongdoing that I come across in the course of my duty,” he says.