NEW DELHI/KATHMANDU: A day after a newspaper report suggested a coup attempt by the Army, the armed forces and defence officials are talking in the same breath to strike out even the remotest possibility of an overthrow of the civilian government and Army Chief General VK Singh dismissed the report as “absolutely stupid”. His reaction came from Kathmandu. He is in the Nepal capital to attend a seminar of service chiefs from SAARC countries.
“Whosoever is trying to make stories against the Army Chief is deplorable. What it shows is that people are unnecessarily trying to throw muck at both the government and the Army and such people should be taken to task,” the General said.
Apparently, the Army Chief had given a warning of the reports doing the rounds in an interview to a weekly magazine on March 13. He had said: “So, you tell him (journalist) 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… 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.”
A daily reported on April 4 that “unauthorised” movement of an infantry unit in Hisar and a section of 50th Para Brigade at Agra towards the capital on January 16 had “spooked” the Centre.