New Delhi: The BJP on Wednesday jumped over a Sunday Guardian newspaper report to accuse four former Congress ministers insulting the Indian Army and a “first order treason” by planting a fake report of Army coup in January 2012. BJP spokesman GVL Narasimha Rao raked up the issue despite the fact that the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence had expressed satisfaction on April 9, 2012 within five days of the coup report in a newspaper and closed the issue of two Army units’ movement towards the capital as a routine exercise.
However, Narasimha Rao wanted BJP leader Kalraj Mishra to immediately convene a meeting of the Standing Committee on Defence that he heads to examine the revelation on how ministers in the Manmohan Singh can stoop so low to defame the Army.
He even tried to implicate Congress President Rahul Gandhi by asking whether the planting of the false coup report was authorised by him. “Plotting a coup is 1st order treason. But the Congress had no qualms taking this route to gratify its perpetual hunger for power.”
The furore was created from a newspaper report of the suspected Army coup that turned out to be just a routine movement of a mechanised infantry unit from Hissar and a Para unit from Agra. Then Army chief General VK Singh, who came under cloud as plotting the alleged coup, is now a union minister of state for external affairs in the Modi government.
He had then tried to blame then Home Minister P Chidambaram for creating sensation by planting the report in a daily. Rao said what happened in 2012 during the UPA-II government amounts to putting the national security in danger and hence he wants the standing committee to inquire afresh the entire episode.