NEW DELHI: In a radical move, India's Parliamentary Committee on Defense has called all three Armed Services chiefs on April 20, for a hearing on the country's defense preparedness. The move was stimulated by media reports, which suggested that India had only a four day reserve stock of arsenal for its tanks. The meeting follows a series of embarrassing events involving army general V K Singh, the Indian media and political establishment, which have laid bare in most brazen terms the Indian government's threadbare concern and commitment to its armed forces. General V K Singh said in an interview in March that a former top ranking army general had offered him a $ 2 million bribe, in order to clear a dubious vehicle purchase contract for the Indian army. The conversation created a furor in the Indian Parliament, which was in session and had forced the defense minister A K Antony to initiate a criminal probe into the affair. Singh's assertion that he had informed the defense minister about the bribery attempt gave the Opposition a handle to attack the ruling Congress-led government. A few days earlier, a letter written by Singh to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh highlighting the frailty of the Indian army surfaced in the media. The letter exposed the shocking shortcomings in the armed forces preparedness in case of war and laid it bare for the world to see. The defense ministry was forced to initiate an intelligence bureau (IB) probe into the leak, which claimed the leak did not come from the general's end. On April 20, the parliamentary committee is expected to review the Indian defense forces from the perspective of capacity and activation of that capacity and its relation to the country's specific threat perception and geo-political strategy of responses.
