Manmohan used to express his helplessness in handling issues, ex-army chief claims in book.
Highlighting prime minister Manmohan Singh’s lack of courage and ability to take quick decisions, former army chief General VK Singh in his autobiography, Courage and Convictions, has said the PM was unable to implement his promised aid programmes in the neighbouring countries and even could not handle his own officers, who had overstretched the Tatra truck scandal issue.
Blaming the PM directly for lacking conviction, while announcing such aid programmes, General Singh mentioned a stalled road project worth Rs 20cr promised to Mayanmar. During Army Day reception in 2012, Singh asked the general about his just concluded visit to Myanmar. “And when I raised the issue of financial aid package of about Rs20 crore, I had come to know from my counterpart in Myanmar, the prime minister replied, ‘General saab, ab yeh procedural problems hain,” said the general, who expected Singh to take on bureaucracy and enforce his aid programme in order to mend relations with the neighbouring country. The general claimed that Singh used to express his helplessness in matters that should have been trivial.
“Had the task (Maynmar road project) been given to the army, we would have handed over the road rollers in less than a week. No wonder then that none of our neighbours trust us,” he wrote, wondering why to make such offers at first place, when the government cannot live with them.
General Singh wrote, he had lost the count of prime minister promising him that he was trying to sort out one issue or the other.
He has also dragged Sigh’s office blaming it for the controversy over his age as well as the Tatra truck scandal. Blaming a senior bureaucrat in the PMO for “orchestrating” the issues, he said name of this officer was “cropping up regularly” and his relatives had been given plots in the BEML complex – the PSU that assembles Tatra trucks in India. Gen Singh also referred a retired army general as a ‘middleman’, who had offered him a bribe of Rs14 crore.
In the book, General Singh mentioned his confrontation with the then union home minister P Chidambaram who, according to him, had made up mind to deploy army in the naxal-hit areas. “I told him, it is a socio-economic and governance issue and needs to be addressed accordingly.”
Singh wrote, arguing, the naxal problem was different from the challenges in Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East, where army was engaged in containing insurgency.
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