Didn't realise I was being bribed: Army Chief

Army Chief,  General VK Singh,  said he had been unable to comprehend that he was being offered a bribe and it was the reason that the retired army official who offered it was allowed to get away from his office.

“One person who has retired recently during talks said that if you do this, then you may get this (a bribe). And if you have not heard something like this before, you will be shocked. You will not understand what the person is saying,”  Singh said in an undated interview with ETV.

“I told him to leave before anything else happened and then later told the Defence Minister,” he said.

When asked the reaction from the minister, Singh said, “He hit his head and said that such people should be kept out.”

Singh refused to name the former army official who had allegedly offered him a bribe and said it was perhaps an error that he did not have the individual arrested in his office.

“Maybe it would have been right to complain against him at that time. Maybe at the time the matter was said in such a way that it was not clear what he was saying. It was not like he was offering cash,” he said.

“He was saying that if you clear this file then you will get this (money). He said everyone does it why don’t you? He did it in an indirect method and so he was not caught,” the army chief said.

The Army Chief said that he and Defence Minister AK Antony had attempted to cleanse the army of corruption but it had “spread like a cancer”. Through their combined efforts though they ensured that it did not spread further.

The Defence Minister ordered a CBI probe into the allegations that Singh was offered a bribe of Rs 14 crore to clear a tranche of 600 sub-standard vehicles of a particular make cleared for purchase. However, questions were raised about why the complaint was not filed earlier and what action had been taken against the lobbyist who had offered the bribe.

Meanwhile, Lt General Tejinder Singh, whose name was thrown up in the bribery allegations, said he had initiated legal action against officials in the army.

“I have retired for the last two years and do not wish to get into any public discourse about the issue,”  he told reporters, adding that he had never offered any bribes to General VK Singh.