New Delhi, May 26: Army Chief General V K Singh in a hard-hitting interview to Times Now has alleged that someone in the government leaked his confidential letter to the Prime Minister on glaring weaknesses in defence preparedness.
Three days before he is to retire, the General regretted going to the Supreme Court on his date of birth issue, and also cautioned the government over demilitarizing Siachen.
Asked how his confidential letter to the PM was leaked, General Singh said that neither he nor anyone close to him was the source of the leak. “In Army, we don't do things like this. It is not our culture...It is a treasonable act. Let us find out who leaked it,” he said.
“I am quite sure and let me tell you this my Army, the 1.3-million Army, is sure that their chief will never leak a letter like that. That's the surety I have.”
The Army chief alleged that “the whole thing (about the leak) was geared to give the impression that it was V K Singh who was leaking it. Somebody had some agenda.”
When asked if this somebody was within the government or outside, he replied: “Has to be within the government, who will be outside?”
When Times Now asked whether someone within the government was “leaking the letter”, Singh said: “Should have. Where did this letter leak out from? It is a top secret letter”.Referring to a PTI report on May 13 that the leak had been traced to a “female Joint Secretary-level officer” in the cabinet Secretariat, Singh said: “(After that report) all those people (who accused him of leaking) should have just got up and apologised to me.”
When told that the Government had denied the PTI report, Singh said: “PTI gives out only those stories which are given to it and we know who gives those stories to them. They don't manufacture it on their own. Somebody must have told them, somebody authoritative enough. Let's find out who did it.”
Incidentally, the Press Information Bureau that night issued a statement: “The government denies that there is any truth in the PTI report on the alleged leak of General V K Singh's letter to the PM. The story is completely baseless.”
On his petition in the Supreme Court over his date of birth controversay, Gen Singh questioned the manner in which the highest court of the land, and a judge on the bench, treated his petition.
“I know what has happened in the Supreme Court,” Singh said. “I will not delve into it. Some point of time, later on, I think I will put it down as to what exactly information we had on how things have gone on. The only thing I can say is that if at all a very senior Supreme Court judge says ‘Blow with the wind', I actually rue this fact that I went to the court... If all of us are told to ‘blow with the wind' then we will all become muggers, we will all become corrupt. Wind is going that way. Are we going to go that way? That is why it was the end of it. When my lawyer asked me I said just withdraw. Enough. I don't want to move (the court),” he said.
This was an apparent reference to a remark by Justice R M Lodha, one of the two judges on the bench: “We want to ensure (that) as Chief of Army you continue to serve the country as you did for 38 years. This verdict should not come in your way. Wise men are those who move with the wind. We take pride in having (an) officer like you. Credit must go to you.”
In the interview, General Singh revealed that he spoke to all his senior officers after approaching the Supreme Court on January 16, asking them to talk to troops down the ranks and ask them not to get “worked up.”“
The day I went to the court I spoke to all my corps commanders, all my army commanders and told them please tell our men, this is my personal issue. It has got nothing to do with the army. They don't have to feel bad. They don't have to feel worked up. They don't have to feel any of this,” he said.
General Singh rejected a recent proposal from Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to demilitarise the Siachen Glacier. “These are all gimmicks that keep coming from the establishment in Pakistan and we will be fools if we fall for them,” Singh said.
“Today you are sitting in dominating heights which cannot be given away. I am sorry. Who is going to look after them? Today, your infrastructure is pretty well advanced. We are perfectly okay up there,” Singh said.
The Army Chief also criticized The Indian Express report of April 4 about how troop movements near the capital on the night of January 16 — the day General Singh moved the Supreme Court — rang alarm bells in the highest levels of the government.
He said that this report was part of an “agenda” and said that the newspaper's Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta, who was one of the authors of the report, had met him over lunch and asked him “questions” about the troop movements.
Asked if this conversation was on the record, General Singh said: “He (Gupta) was not recording it but I am quit sure there is no journalist in this world who is ever off the record.” Asked whether his “side of the story” was taken, he said, “No.”
“I told him what the facts were...So where was this spooking thing? Look at the way the story has been written. So what was the agenda? I don't know but surely there was an agenda,” he said.
When his attention was drawn to the remarks of Minister of State for Defence M M Pallam Raju that “probably someone down the line (in the government) may have read too much” into the movements, Gen Singh said: “The (Minister) did not say the government was spooked. What he said was that a lower functionary created an alarm. Now who that lower functionary is, I think, the Honourable Raksha Rajya Mantri will be knowing very well.”
