Army chief General V.K. Singh Monday termed as “fiction” reports that he had ordered phone tapping of key government functionaries while his birth date row was raging.
“Fiction does not require any reaction. If people concoct stories and some of the irresponsible editors allow those stories to get published, I don’t think it requires any reaction,” he told reporters in Hyderabad on the sidelines of a function to release a book.
Singh made these remarks with Minister of State for Defence M.M. Pallam Raju beside him.
Reports had suggested that the government was probing an anonymous complaint against the army chief, including that he ordered tapping of phones using “off-the-air” interceptors to listen in on conversations in the national capital, apart from display of nepotism by appointing officers from the Rajput Regiment, to which he belongs, in key positions in the army headquarters.
The Supreme Court had on Feb 10 settled Singh’s birth date as May 10, 1950, for service records purposes, putting an end to the controversy that had raged for nearly two years, nearly derailing the civil-military relations.
To a query on his letter to Defence Minister A.K. Antony over shortage of weapon systems and ammunition in the army, Singh said he had brought the status of inventories to the ministry’s notice.
“The minister of state for defence is aware. Our efforts in the last two years have been to ensure that the operational preparedness of the army improves. In that there are a large number of measures. Periodically, we have been apprising the ministry as to how things are going on, what are the shortages, and what action needs to be done.”
Meanwhile in New Delhi, the army headquarters too reacted strongly to the reports of phone-tapping and termed it as “maligning” the army’s image.
“The people responsible are some disgruntled officers, retired and serving, whose sole aim is to create a mistrust between the army and the defence ministry,” officers in the army headquarters said.
On the recent reports of bugging in Antony’s office that was denied by the minister himself, the officers said the Military Intelligence “has the mandate to routinely debug the offices of senior functionaries” of the defence ministry and the army.
“In a routine check, some abnormality was noticed in the defence ministers office, which was brought to the notice of the defence secretary. Further checks carried out revealed that the voltage drop noticed was due to malfunctioning of an instrument,” they said.
They also clarified that the army did “not carry out off-the-air monitoring and that it always sought Intelligence Bureau assistance if there was a need.
“The monitoring equipment is in the possession of the Signal Intelligence and is deployed along the borders and in counter-insurgency areas. This equipment is under the control of the Director General Defence Intelligence Agency and not under the Military Intelligence,” they said.
“The army strongly denies the reports and takes strong exception to such salacious and mala fide stories,” they added.
——IANS