Strange things are happening in the defence administration of the country. The dead past is now being dug up from the back of the graveyard just like the future was being fought tooth and nail in the court until sometime ago. The present tense is simply the writing on the wall. When an army chief crosses swords with a defence minister, perhaps such is the order of the day (the use of oxymoronic phrase is unintentional).   

Two years after the alleged actual incident, General VK Singh has said he was offered a bribe of '14 crore by a lobbyist to clear the purchase of substandard vehicles. That was barely six months after he took over as the army chief in 2010.

Senility is natural and understandable months before retirement. The good thing is that the memory of the forgotten incident struck him in the middle of a media interview and the matter came to light! 
Singh didn’t point a finger at defence minister AK Antony, though. He said the minister was also shocked by the incident. “Meri baat sunkar Raksha Mantri ne apna matha peet liye tha (Antony held his head in his hands in sheer dismay when I told him). He said such people should be kept out,” Singh said. That happened in 2010 and the minister ordered a CBI probe into the incident as soon as he read Singh’s interview in 2012!

What comes out of the washing of the dirty linens in public is the helplessness of their high offices. A four-star general runs to the defence minister to complain about how his office is violated by an insinuation of bribery, comes back, sleeps over the incident and then lays an egg in the media two years later. The defence minister, who (in Singh’s own words) was too shocked by the incident to react, reacts after two years when Singh’s egg in the media is hatched into a full-blown controversy. 
Both sides have defences. Singh says the lobbyist’s bribe offer, on behalf of a foreign military vehicle supplier that has a tie-up with a defence PSU, was made in “an indirect way” and left him completely stumped (or shall we say dormant this long?). The defence ministry while conceding that Singh had made a verbal complaint to the minister argues that the army chief did not submit a written complaint or “seriously pursue the matter” thereafter. Was it then only a joke shared between Antony and Singh, laughed off and quickly forgotten?

Singh has to go even if bitterly and a year early. So will Antony even if unwillingly and two years later. But their offices will be there. And also the muck they have left on them.