Khemka unmasks Hooda's land deal

Haryana CM's aunt received prime panchayat land worth crores

Months after exposing alleged shady land deals involving Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, whistle-blower IAS officer Ashok Khemka has trained his guns on Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.

Khemka has alleged that Hooda’s aunt received a prime piece of usurped panchayat land worth crores in Faridabad district bordering the national capital. The latest revelations are part of Khemka’s 105-page reply submitted in May to a three-member inquiry committee comprising senior IAS officers Krishna Mohan, K K Jalan and Rajan Gupta.

The committee was set up by the Haryana government to probe into allegations that the state allegedly helped Vadra pocket huge amount of money through fraud land deals.
Khemka had cancelled a land mutation between a company owned by Vadra and real estate giant DLF last October. He had to incur the state’s wrath for taking on powerful opponents.  Neither the Centre nor the Congress-led state government, however, acted on the allegations.

In chapter three of his reply, titled “Violations of rules of natural justice,” Khemka recalled detecting misappropriation of 734 acres of panchayat land during an inspection of land records of Ankhir village in Faridabad to favour VVIPs.  The prime plots doled out to the VVIPs are located along main road from HUDA Gymkhana Club in Sector 21 to Surajkund and Badkhal Lake.

“One such VVIP benefiting from the second partition proceedings was Krishna Kanta, mother of Praveen Kumar, IAS, who was the deputy commissioner of Faridabad at that time,” he said.


Krishna Kanta is reported to be the paternal aunt of the present chief minister of the state.

As deputy commissioner, it was the duty of Praveen Kumar to protect the interests of the gram panchayat in the partition proceedings before his subordinate revenue officer.
“In a reference under Section 16 of the Punjab Land Revenue Act, the Financial Commissioner Revenue was requested to refer the matter to the collector under Section 13-A of the Punjab Act No 18 of 1961 for decision on title of the panchayat land partitioned. He was also requested to annul the mutations entered. But to the best knowledge of the undersigned, no action was taken in the written reference dated 5/10/2012,” alleged the IAS officer.

Khemka questioned the Hooda government’s move to draft Mohan and Jalan into the inquiry panel.”These two officers could not be expected to be objective or fair and to ascertain the true facts and submit true and complete findings on the land scams in Haryana,” he said.

Mohan and Jalan should have “dissociated themselves as the chairman and a member of the committee respectively, since their own acts of commission and omission were under scanner.” Mohan was the financial commissioner (Revenue) and Jalan the principal secretary in the department of town and country planning and urban estates when the licence of Vadra-owned Sky Light Hospitality was renewed by the department of town and country planning on January 18, 2011, he pointed out.

He also alleged that prime land in Gurgaon and Faridabad had been sold to land sharks in collusion with authorities.