Why this year's Magsaysay winner will put Modi sarkar to shame
There must be an entire retinue of deeply "red" faces in both Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s council of ministers and members of the erstwhile Congress government of Haryana, with the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation proclaiming honours for forty-year-old Sanjiv Chaturvedi, an upright Indian Forest Service officer.
Chaturvedi’s Magsaysay citation, released by the foundation on Wednesday morning, reads: “For his exemplary integrity, courage and tenacity in uncompromisingly exposing and painstakingly investigating corruption in public office, and his resolute crafting of program and system improvements to ensure that government honorably serves the people of India.”
This cannot be good news for the long list of politicians, from former Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda, former state forests minister Kiran Chaudhary, union science and technology minister Harsh Vardhan and the incumbent health minister Jai Prakash Nadda, who are widely viewed as complicit in the hounding of Chaturvedi through the length of his relatively short but eventful career from the forest department in Haryana to Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
The young officer’s nightmare began with his very first posting in Kurukshetra when he booked a group of influential contractors working on the Hansi-Butana Canal of illegally felling trees and poaching protected animals and destruction of habitat inside the Saraswati Wildlife Sanctuary.
Instead of being rewarded for his obvious diligence, Chaturvedi was reprimanded and sent on a "punishment" posting to Fatehabad. And in August 2007, the Hooda Government placed Chaturvedi under suspension for “insubordination” in the same case, on the incredulous premise that he had failed to follow orders in acting against wrongdoing!
The Haryana administration’s lies were however soon exposed when the state forest department sanctioned prosecution of the contractors, based entirely on Chaturvedi’s earlier reports.
Undeterred, the righteous officer continued to expose instances of rampant corruption including large scale misappropriation of money in internationally funded tree plantation projects at Hissar and Jhajjar districts in 2009.
Chaturvedi’s doggedness and refusal to bend earned him the collective wrath of Haryana’s top politicians and senior bureaucracy. Besides 12 transfers over six years of service, the officer had three trumped up FIRs filed against him and faced four vigilance probes in addition to being suspended and eventually chargesheeted (under major penalty).
There was even an attempt to embroil the officer in an abetment to suicide case involving a subordinate who was being investigated for corruption consequent to an expose made by Chaturvedi.
His eventual move, on central deputation, to Delhi in June 2012 did bring a measure of respite.
As deputy director and chief vigilance officer (CVO) at AIIMS, Chaturvedi remained sharply vigilant, initiating action in nearly 200 cases of corruption, of which punishment was imposed in 78 instances, chargesheets issued in 87 and more than 20 cases were referred for a CBI for investigation probe.
While his good work drew appreciation in the form of two “outstanding” ratings from former health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, it wasn’t long after the BJP-led NDA government took office for things to take another grim turn.
In August 2014, the then health minister Harsh Vardhan stripped Chaturvedi of the CVO charge reducing the officer to what he later described in a petition to the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) and being “made jobless.”
Though Vardhan denied it, Chaturvedi’s removal as CVO was widely reported as consequent to a vilifying campaign by contractors, corrupt officials and a section of BJP leaders. Notably, reports also claimed that the incumbent health minister J.P. Nadda, who was then only an MP, wanted the IFS officer out.
So even on Wednesday morning, when the Magsaysay Foundation announced its 2015 awards, Sanjiv Chaturvedi remained “jobless” as he so aptly puts it. Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal’s bid to rescue the officer by appointing him an OSD in his own secretariat, has been interminably pending – the file lying abandoned somewhere between the union health ministry and the director’s office in AIIMS.
And while the politicians and bureaucrats who hounded him had nothing to say, the announcement drew a flood of congratulatory messages on social media.
“Congratulations Anshu and Sanjeev for Magsaysay award. V well deserved. God bless u,” Kejriwal tweeted his somewhat belated felicitation on Wednesday evening.
Haryana IAS officer Ashok Khemka set the Twitter ball rolling minutes after the announcement: “Congratulations to Sanjiv Chaturvedi and Anshu Gupta for receiving the 2015 Ramon Magsayay Award.”
Chaturvedi’s Facebook page had this from Ravi Patil, a batch mate: “today I am getting goose bumps as my batch-mate, Sanjiv Chaturvedi has been named as the winner of the Magsaysay award this year. Wow, it's an awesome news. So happy for you brother.”