Loud Thinking

Gen V K Singh oppose deployment of army to tackle Maoists

Link:- http://m.timesofindia.com/india/Gen-V-K-Singh-opposes-deployment-of-army-to-tackle-Maoists/articleshow/46921289.cms

RAIPUR : Union Minister General V K Singh said he was not in favour of deploying army in any campaign to tackle the Maoists.

“Army has to be deployed only when there is a threat to national security, particularly from any other country,” he said while replying to questions during a discussion based on his autobiography “Courage and Conviction”. The event was organized as part of Chhattisgarh’s first international flim festival, which concluded today.

“If we deploy army in places where problems have cropped up due to socio-political reasons, it could adversely affect the image of the forces”.
Gen Singh said that as a chief of army, he had made this stand clear to the then union home minister P Chidambaram.

Replying to a question about deployment of Indian army for peace- keeping operations in Sri Lanka, General V K Singh, a former chief of army staff, quipped ” The decision to deploy IPKF in island nation was a high-level policy failure”.

Stating that decision to go to Srilanka was not taken at the level of army, the former army chief said in fact the government of India and Srilanka had entered into an agreement while the fight was between Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam and Sri Lanka government.

Without naming anyone, General Singh said ” At times, the situation was awkward. We had to fight the very people trained by us”.

During the IPKF operations, the union minister said, the Indian Forces got many opportunities to hunt down LTTE chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran but every time there were instructions to give him a safe passage.

The union minister also claimed that at one point Srilankan president Premadasa sought to help the LTTE rebels to fight IPKF.