New Delhi, Sept. 21: Former army chief V.K. Singh has re-opened his bruising battle with the government in the wake of a report that alleged he misused an intelligence unit.
“The whole report is hogwash and motivated,” he has said. The former army chief also blamed a clique he loosely identified as “the Chandigarh lobby” of a campaign against him.
He said he could have stopped the appointment of General Bikram Singh as his successor and questioned the decision of the judiciary in not giving a ruling on his date of birth “when it can decide that a rapist and murderer is a juvenile on the basis of his matriculation certificate”.
Since the government said yesterday that it was studying an army report on the intelligence unit, the technical support division (TSD) and the BJP cried political vendetta against V.K. Singh because he had shared the dais at a public rally with Narendra Modi, Singh decided to go public through an interview to audio-visual news agency ANI.
“Anyone who says that the unit in question — the TSD — is a private army of the chief does not know anything about intelligence,” said Singh.
On the allegation that he used funds for the TSD to try and topple the Omar Abdullah government in Jammu & Kashmir, the former chief said: “The army has given stability to Kashmir…Mr Abdullah is playing politics.”
He said the TSD was set up after the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai as part of efforts to check cross-border terrorism. Its establishment had the approval of the then national security adviser M.K. Narayanan and the defence ministry. V.K. Singh was the chief of army staff from March 31, 2010, to May 31, 2012.
On allegations that he tried to stall the appointment of General Bikram Singh, V.K. Singh said: “There is a case against Bikram Singh in court. If we wanted to cause problems, we could have by changing the army’s stance.”
“It involves the killing of a man, a 70-year-old, who is labelled as a foreign terrorist. There is no terrorist in J&K who is more than 30 to 40 years old. And therefore, there was a hue and cry raised by humanitarian groups in J&K because there was a family, a poor Gujjar family, who identified this man to be theirs,” said Singh. The former chief, who took the unprecedented step of dragging the government to court while in service, was still hurting from the controversy over his date of birth that, he says, was the creation of arms lobbies that wanted to shorten his tenure because he was not corruptible.
But in revealing his wounds, Singh has also risked blaming the judiciary — he had challenged the government in Supreme Court on the question of his date of birth but the court decided not to give a ruling and the general had to withdraw his petition.
“If the superior judiciary of this country can believe the matriculation certificate, and say a rapist and a murderer is a juvenile, what happens to my certificate which has been checked, rechecked and carbon-dated over a period of time. Why? Why didn't they give a decision?” asked Singh.
The courts had admitted that one of the killers of the Delhi gang rape victim was a juvenile on the basis of his school certificate.
But if the government had accepted V.K. Singh’s plea, it would have had to give him an additional 10 months in office. That would have scuttled the chances of Bikram Singh becoming the army chief.
Singh said he did not believe that the report by an army headquarters board of officers on the TSD had anything “incendiary”. It was with national security adviser Shiv Shankar Menon “for closure” after the government examined .
On Friday, the defence ministry gave a statement, saying the report “impinges on matters of national security”. It is yet to decide on whether to call for a CBI inquiry.
