Army chief had an inkling of `media mischief’ in mid-March

Army Chief V K Singh had doubted some ''media mischief'' like the recent article on ''suspicious troop movement'' with journalists trying to make good every bad news a front-page story while they continue to ignore all stories good.

In that interview with `The Week'' magazine last month, the Army Chief had said that while the Army was doing a professional job, there were people both uniformed and not in uniform, who had their own axes to grind. They start feeding the media with all kinds of wrong information, he had said.

Gen Singh had told the journalist that if the Army conducted an exercise some people with "nefarious aims" would say that it "wanted to do something else". "Even, let us say one of our corps or divisions or brigades does exercise, somebody will say, Oh! they did exercise; It was not an exercise, they wanted to do something else.''

"Now you will make a story out of it. There are lots of people who want to make stories these days for various nefarious aims, if I can put it like that," he had told the magazine during the interview on 13 March.

The Army Chief lampooned such writings saying, they should have clarified facts before publishing anything so serious.

"If somebody has got any doubt, they should come and face us. They won't because they know they are wrong".