Zeenews Bureau
New Delhi: That there was some talk about the
mid-January movement of two elite Army units towards the
capital which had exercised Army Chief Gen V K Singh's mind
is evident in an interview he had given to an English magazine
in middle of March.
"Even, let us say one of our forces or divisions or brigades does exercise, somebody will say, oh! they did exercise. It was not an exercise, they wanted to do something else,” the Army Chief is quoted by the magazine.
He further said in the interview on March 13, “Now you will make a story out of it. There are lots of people who want to make stories these days for various nefarious aims, if I can put it like that.”
“If somebody has got any doubt, they should come and face us. They won't because they know they are wrong,” he added.
He had backed the Army during the course of the interview saying that they were doing a ‘professional job’.
"You tell him (the reporter) something juicy, it comes on front page and nobody even looks whether there is any truth in it. It is already done. So, you have already thrown muck on somebody. There are lots of people who are doing that and I don't know what their motives are”, General Singh said on the kind of reporting that was doing the rounds.
The Army Chief's comments last month assume significance against the backdrop of a report in the Indian Express yesterday that there was an unusual movement of a Mechanised
Infantry unit from Hisar in Haryana and a sizeable section of 50 Para Brigade from Agra on the night of January 16-17
towards the capital.
The news report was described as "alarmist" by Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh who had said that such reports should
not be taken at face value while Defence Minister AK Antony
had described it as "absolutely baseless".
With PTI inputs
First Published: Thursday, April 05, 2012, 19:15