Uttarakhand: Army Officer held on Rape Charges

Dehradun: Amid charges of land scams and low morale of Indian Army due to the ongoing schism in Military/ Political top brass, and Indian Army has been arrested on charges of repeatedly raping a woman officer of the same rank after falsely entering into a wedlock here. Uttarakhand Police arrested the Lt Colonel rank officer on Saturday night from Jhunjhunu area and he was being brought here, police sources said.
The woman officer, having the same Lt Colonel rank, has alleged in her complaint that the officer entered into a wedlock with her but later did not accept her as his wife.
In the FIR she alleged the officer raped her during the past few months in a military hospital.The woman also alleged that the officer was already married and did not tell his marital status to her.

INDIAN ARMY'S WAR WITHIN : CORRUPTION

After General VK Singh had taken over as Chief of Army Staff in 2010, a retired Lieutenant General, whose name figures in the Adarsh Society Housing scandal called on him at the office ostensibly to discuss developments in Kashmir. After the polite conversation, the retired intelligence chief asked him about the pending heavy vehicle contract and blatantly made it clear that there was Rs 50 crore for him in cold cash if the Rs 400 crore deal was awarded to an East European manufacturer instead of Indo-Russian joint venture. The retired general was immediately escorted out of the Chief’s office and was declared persona non grata. The ex-serviceman was not the first or the last of his kind as greed seems to be good for Army’s top brass.

On Tuesday, the CBI registered a case against a former Army Vice Chief Lt General Noble Thamburaj for allegedly conspiring with a builder Kalpataru over a select piece of Pune Cantonment defence land. One of the companies of the same builder is also under the CBI scanner for illegally obtaining prime defence land in Kandivili in Mumbai with the support of former minister of defence production Rao Inderjit Singh and former Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor. The CBI has already registered a preliminary inquiry into the Kandivili land deal last month and moving towards registering a proper case.

After Mumbai’s Adarsh Housing scandal, involving two former Army chiefs and one former Navy chief among others, and Sukhna land scandal, which led to court martial and dismissal of former military secretary Lt Gen Avadesh Prakash, these two illegal land deals have taken the Army’s morale to a new low. From the unsavoury sagas of Ketchup Colonel, Booze Brigadier and Ration General, it becomes quite evident that Indian military is going through marked deterioration of human resource and character.

To top it all, there is growing politicisation of the Indian military for promotions, lucrative assignments and post-retirement jobs. The rot within the Indian defence establishment is clearly evident from the retired officers who liaison for defence contractors at golf courses and bars in Lutyen’s Delhi to ex-generals and admirals being employed by hardware dealers for lobbying in South Block.

In public perception the image of an Army officer is hardly different from that of an untrustworthy police officer. It is evident from these scandals that significant section within Army is out to make a quick buck and would do anything for few pieces of silver. This mindset goes right to the top, as otherwise, how one justifies that no less than five top generals including Kapoor and Thamburaj were declared low medical category for disability pension and IT rebates. Before the health of Indian Army deteriorates further, it is time that the UPA government intervened to stem the rot.

Fortunately, South Block has defence minister AK Antony and Army Chief Gen V K Singh at the helm of affairs at this crucial juncture. Both are above board integrity wise and cannot stand corruption. While swift action and stringent punishment act as a strong deterrent, it is time that the military mounted strong vigilance on its men and started the weeding out process at an early stage.

The promotions and postings process must be made totally transparent through technology with any interference from ruling party politicians or influential arms dealers. Promotion should be based on merit and not seniority as is the case now. Postings to big cities should be rotated fast so that an officer does not develop vested interest. There should be consolidation of defence lands sprawling all over the country with land records updated so that unscrupulous Army officers cannot illegally pass it on to builders.

While it is impossible to isolate or insulate military personnel from increasingly money oriented Indian society, it is important that military ethos is maintained or professionalism will be hit hard in the services. It is important to drive home the fact that the government takes special care of the armed forces through dedicated hospitals, housing, primary and secondary education and recreation facilities.

The average facilities provided to an Army Colonel, equivalent to a director level officer of central government, are far above as compared to his or her government counterparts. Same holds true for higher ranks. Yet there is increasing tendency within the armed forces to get attracted to money through illegal means or hardware deal making. The prevention exercise has to start from the top as the trooper on the border or the Line of Control looks towards the top brass as idols. Otherwise, all the respect won by those armed forces personnel who gave up their lives will be lost and Indian borders will be at peril.

 Reference

Does General Kapoor own five houses?

Chandigarh: Deepak Kapoor says he didn't know that the massively-discounted flat he was allotted in a high-rise in Mumbai was meant for war widows and veterans. That could be construed as an oddity - Kapoor did after all serve as Army Chief.

He said last week that he would surrender his flat in Adarsh Society - a building in Mumbai's expensive Colaba area that is blowing the lid off a conspiracy between politicians, bureaucrats and senior Army officers to gift housing to themselves at huge bargains.

The retired General won't be homeless.  He has been accused of owning a total of six properties in Mumbai, Gurgaon and Delhi's Dwarka district. In August, Ambica Banerjee, who is an MP of Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress, wrote to the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister, asking how the General afforded these assets. Sources in the Defence Ministry say Kapoor, in a letter to Defence Minister AK Antony, has said he welcomes a formal investigation.

Banerjee's formal letter of complaint states that in addition to the now-returned Adarsh flat, Kapoor owns a flat in Dwarka (a Delhi suburb), three houses in Gurgaon, and a penthouse in Lokhandwala in Mumbai.

There's more.  Kapoor was allotted a plot in Gurgaon by the Haryana government in June 2009. Kapoor paid merely Rs. 36 lakh for it - because Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda carved it out of his preferential quota - which allows the Chief Minister to reward residents who have distinguished themselves through their service. 

The rules state that those who are awarded these plots cannot sell them for five years. But six months after he was given his land, Kapoor wanted to sell  - the plot by now was worth Rs. 1.5 crore. The Haryana government reportedly refused to permit this.

However, Kapoor told NDTV that he does not  own any property other than the two-bedroom Adarsh Society flat that he has returned and the Gurgaon plot given to him by Hooda.

POTA - A major Contributer in illegitimate Abductions in India

It came as a shock to the citizens of the country that in spite of the tall claims of not having implemented the draconian POTA in Bihar , the government, administration and police in the state have been using POTA to imprison and victimize political activists and agrarian poor. This left ample scope for the rich and the powerful to escape while allowing the police and administration to crackdown upon the asserting poor and those organising them.
Since the NDA government introduced POTA through an unprecedented joint session of the parliament, several political parties have expressed their opinion against POTA. Though no action has been taken as yet, the UPA government after assuming power has announced the withdrawal of POTA. However this also been announced prospectively and not with retrospective effect as has been the demand of dozens of civil liberty organisation and human rights groups who have pointed out violations in case after case. The fate of thousands of innocents across the country, who have been booked under POTA, continues to hang in uncertainty, particularly in the light of the fate of the TADA prisoners of Bihar, who found no justice even after the law that they had been booked under had long lapsed, since the cases against them were never withdrawn.

POTA act of India and its Misuse

When the Gujarat government withdrew Poto from the Godhra case, the Opposition parties understandably seized it as an official admission that the new terrorist law, like the earlier one, is being misused to target the minorities. All the more so because this decision followed an expose in The Indian Express on the selective application of Poto: while the Godhra suspects were booked under Poto, the state had no compunction about not applying that law to any of the accused involved in the so-called Hindu backlash. The state, of course, never actually admitted the selective use of Poto. Instead, it sought to make the withdrawal of terrorism allegations from the Godhra case appear as innocuous as possible. It claimed that the Godhra police backtracked purely on the advocate general’s advice that Poto provisions could not be invoked without first appointing the various regulatory authorities envisaged by that law.
As a corollary, the Narendra Modi government clarified that once those authorities are in place, the police may reinvoke Poto (now Pota) in the Godhra case. To be sure, this is not an unlikely scenario because the Godhra tragedy, in which over 50 Hindus were roasted alive in a train, does bear the appearance of a terrorist attack. But so do some of the retaliatory attacks on Muslims around Gujarat. Yet, given the communal bias it displayed over the last one month, can you even begin to imagine that the Modi government will make no distinction between the Hindu miscreants and their Muslim counterparts? And this is not only because of the Hindutva ideology of the BJP or the Sangh parivar. Let us not forget that the Congress governments of the past had also failed to be even-handed in applying Pota’s predecessor TADA in cases involving Hindu-Muslim conflicts.
It can be argued that the Congress party has its own unsavoury record of communal misdeeds. But this is not an analysis of the secular credentials of our political parties. The attempt here is to show that if TADA or Pota has a record of being used in a discriminatory manner, it is not necessarily because the law is consciously misused or abused. There is an inherent bias in the way terrorism is defined or, rather, interpreted. And that is what makes Muslims more vulnerable than Hindus to the rigours of the terrorist law irrespective of the party in power.
Recall December 6, 1992, and its aftermath. If, in Modi’s memorable words, Gujarat was a reaction to Godhra, the Bombay blasts were a reaction to the Babri Masjid demolition. But the parallel ends there. In fact, from the viewpoint of the terrorist law, the violence in Godhra and Gujarat are a reversal of the events of 1992-93. The BJP government regards the ‘action’ in Godhra as an instance of terrorism while the ‘reaction’ around Gujarat has been passed off as routine cases of rioting, looting and murder. In contrast, the Congress rulers passed off the ‘action’ in Ayodhya as a case of vandalism and other such offences under the ordinary law while the ‘reaction’ in Bombay was regarded as an instance of terrorism. It may be noted that for invoking the terrorist law, it did not matter whether the event concerned was an ‘action’ or a ‘reaction’. It also did not matter whether the miscreants used explosives or inflammable substances. After all, much like the way the mob in Godhra poured fuel and lit fire to the bogies carrying kar sevaks from Ayodhya, the miscreants in Ahmedabad and other places of Gujarat used all sorts of lethal weapons and hazardous materials to kill over 700 Muslims. Let’s face it. All that seemed to decide whether an offence constituted terrorism was the religion of the accused persons. As a result, in the events of 2002 as well as 1992-93, those booked under the terrorist law were predominantly Muslims while those booked under the ordinary law were predominantly Hindus.

The bias in the interpretation of the law becomes all the more evident from the long-winded definition of the expression ‘terrorist act’. Pota has been touted an improvement on TADA and one of the claimed reforms is that the definition of ‘terrorist act’ has been made sharper and therefore less prone to abuse. So, even if we go by the narrower definition of Pota, the Babri Masjid demolition, the underlying cause of the recent disturbances, should have been dealt with as a terrorist act. The presence of top BJP leaders in Ayodhya on the fateful day does not detract from the terrorist nature of the demolition. It fits the definition of Pota as there is ample scope to contend that the mosque was demolished with intent ‘‘to strike terror in the people or any section of the people’’. That the kar sevaks did not use bombs or such devastating methods does not matter because Pota says the terrorist act against a person or property could have been committed ‘‘by any other means whatsoever’’. Yet, the failure to book the kar sevaks and their instigators under TADA despite its wider definition never became an issue. The problem then is not just the misuse of the law but its selective use.

Reality of Indian Army exposed by an Indian Retd Brigadier

Recent scandals of Indian Army have exposed the inter-Army rifts and prejudice of Hindus over Sikhs. Segregation over religion and hegemony of Hindus' in Army is an open secret. Amid recent scams of Indian Army, another Brigadier has mustered up some courage to narrate his experiences in Indian Army. Read and decide it yourself . 

By Brig Rajinder Singh

The Indian Army as said by some credible sources is believed to be in existence from the Stone Age. Today, it is known as being the largest all volunteer ground force in the world with over 1,000,000 active duty soldiers who are meticulously scrutinized on the subject of their agility and acumen. It has fought four wars with Pakistan with an unabated zeal and courage to abrogate his enemy whilst dislodging it from a number of impregnable posts.

Regrettably, today our Army is the manifestation of a political stage show where the Government and Army are trying to accentuate their hegemony over each other. However, another catastrophe can be envisaged as the uneven distribution of power in intra-Army units. Yes, I am reminiscing the age row controversy of IA Chief and the internal fissure of Army which has unnerved it enormously. Hitherto, severe allegations have been imposed by the Gov and Army against each other which could have insurmountable ramifications leading an Army coup in India. Whom to trust and whom not to? The Army, CBI, Military Intelligence and Defense Ministry chorus has reached a stalemate where the only way out of it is to make each other a scapegoat.

Recent accusation of Army Chief about getting bribery offer is also a reprisal towards Government and as per Indian penal code (Act 45 of 1860), whoever commits the offence of bribery shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both and now the recent blow of leaked letter of IA Chief to Prime Minister is the harbinger of how intimidating the situation is. Conversely, former national security advisor Brajesh Mishra said that General VK Singh who currently embroiled in a bribery scam is the worst Army Chief so far and that General Singh is a failure.  Any person with a sharp insight can easily evaluate that Brajesh Mishra is funded by our Government so as to malign Army Chief. 

Well, Politicization in Army is not novel yet undisclosed. I myself was despised ironically when I (being a Sikh) charged a few Army officers (being Hindus) over disciplinary issues in late 80’s. The repercussions were paradoxically intense, when I was pressurized by higher authorities to retract my decision which I spurned. My postings were orchestrated in connivance of few ‘Extremist Officers’ and my track record was forged which consequently leaded to my retirement. Ostensibly, strong political blocks representing their religious beliefs have hatched in Army which is no doubt truly detrimental for our Army. I left India but my heart is still there. I wish our Army could think above religion or race while defending our motherland.

Make-Belief Protectors of India at Each Other's Throat

NEW DELHI: Army chief Gen VK Singh has filed a formal written complaint with the CBI over his alleged bribe offer from a senior retired officer to clear 'sub-standard' trucks.

According to Times Now, CBI has received the complaint and is examining it.

After analysing this written complaint, CBI will decide on filing an FIR in the case.

Earlier, the Army chief had sought a few more days to file his detailed complaint.

Gen Singh, who has named retired Lt Gen Tejinder Singh as the person who had allegedly made the offer, in his initial complaint, was asked by CBI officials to give a detailed complaint about the issue.

Gen Singh had claimed in media interviews that an equipment lobbyist had offered him a bribe of Rs 14 crore to clear the tranche of trucks, a matter which he had reported to defence minister A K Antony.

The ministry had then recommended a CBI probe into the allegation.

Meanwhile, retired Lt Gen Tejinder Singh recorded his statement against the Army chief in a Delhi court. He has filed a criminal defamation case against VK Singh.

The court has reserved its judgement and will analyse the evidence before deciding on summoning the Army chief in the case.

Saving Minorities or Struggling for Survival?? India Fears Coup

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Two Indian army units that moved towards New Delhi on a January night without notifying the government raised an alarm in the capital, the Indian Express newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing several unidentified sources.

The newspaper report said the infantry unit of the 33rd Armoured Division based 150 km (90 miles) from Delhi and a unit of the airbourne 50 Para brigade based in Agra to the south reached the outskirts of Delhi before being ordered back.

The army told the newspaper the units were engaged in routine training exercises to test their mobility in fog and did not need to warn the government in advance. Defence ministry spokesman Sitanshu Kar told Reuters it was not true the manoeuvres had caused alarm in the ministry.

The troop movements happened at a time of high friction between Army Chief Vijay Kumar Singh and the government. The newspaper said the accepted view is there was a breakdown in communication rather than a plot of any kind.

The military in India is not known for conspiring against the government in a region plagued by instability.

On the night in question, lookouts confirmed the two units were travelling towards Delhi, the report said.

Defence Minister A.K. Antony was informed and the government ordered police to check all vehicles on roads to Delhi as a way of slowing traffic. The defence secretary, the ministry's top civil servant, cut short a trip to Malaysia to handle the situation.

The report highlights the deep rifts and tense atmosphere in recent months between the world's second largest standing army and the government.

On January 16, the day the exercises took place, Singh took a case against the government to the Supreme Court in a row about whether he could serve another year before retiring. He later lost the case.

The army chief has since said he was offered a $2.8 million bribe and accused the defence minister of not acting on information about corruption in the forces. He also wrote a letter to the prime minister in March saying the army was not in proper shape to defend the country. The letter was leaked.