VK Singh pays for aligning with Narendra Modi
The Congress-led UPA Government would like us to believe that it is not witch-hunting former Chief of Army Staff General VK Singh. Why that's a brazen lie is clear from the sequence of events: Within days of the retired Army chief sharing a platform with the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi at a public rally in Haryana, the Government leaks out to a national newspaper the findings of an internal Army inquiry which alleged that Mr Singh had spent more than eight crore rupees on illegal surveillance and used covert intelligence funds to try and topple a democratically elected Government in a State.
Once the matter came into the public domain, thanks to the Government's dirty tricks department, the regime's Ministers promptly seized the occasion to claim that the issue was “grave” because it concerned “national security” and that the Centre would very “seriously” look into the matter. The Government had the report with it since March but it leaked it only now, after realising that the former Army chief was not going to lead a quiet and retired life, unlike many of his predecessors, but participate in campaigns for socio-political change. If the Congress-led regime still denies the linkage, it must explain why it sat over a report whose findings, in its own words, ‘impinge on matters of national security', for six months. Apart from the fact that it was waiting for the ‘right occasion' to do, the Government's inertia could also be because the allegations the report has levelled are too wild to stand even the most preliminary legal scrutiny. The Government also needs to answer why it accepted an internal Army probe report, when such a report ought not to have come to it in the first place. There are set procedures to follow. The controversial report came into existence after a Board of Officers led by the Director-General of Military Operations conducted the inquiry. The logical step for the Army should have been to set up a Court of Inquiry, invite Mr Singh to depose in his defence, prepare a summary of evidence and make conclusions. The matter would then move to the stage of court martial, if the Army deemed it necessary. Since these procedures have not been followed, it can only be surmised that a section in the Army, which possibly has an axe to grind with the retired Army chief, collaborated with the Government to short-circuit the process and put Mr Singh in the dock.
The former Army chief's detractors have been busy spreading the ludicrous impression that Mr Singh had set up a ‘private intelligence' unit within the Army to spy upon the Union Government and topple the Government of Jammu & Kashmir. The Technical Services Division of the Army, which the accusers are referring to, wasn't established by Mr Singh. The idea of a super-secret unit was floated after the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, and Mr Singh was not the Army chief then. The Union Government accepted the suggestion to set up a covert intelligence unit to meet terror challenges, and the idea fructified during Mr Singh's tenure. Over the months various theories were floated of the former Army head using the resources of this unit to snoop on Governments, but these conspiracy angles proved to be gobbledygook.
Alarmingly, the UPA Government appears willing to compromise national security in its obsession to fix Mr Singh. There is talk of having a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation into the functioning of Military Intelligence, with specific focus on the retired Army chief's tenure. This threatens to expose sensitive covert operations the MI is engaged in. The Centre tried to do similar damage to the Intelligence Bureau in the Ishrat Jahan case. The nonsense must stop.