No armed coup can take place in India, says former Army Chief Gen V K Singh

Singh suggested that the coup story was prompted by a 'Chandigarh think-tank', which included a senior official in the Prime Minister's Office and two senior journalists, who were "prompted" to write about it.

"They (the two journalists) must have been prompted. You do not write a coup story without being prompted. I am sure that everybody is intelligent enough not to write a thing like that," he said.

In his autobiography 'Courage and Convictions' published by Aleph, the former Chief has said that the coup story breaking in a national daily had the "masala of a C-grade movie script.

"Fiction or not, a banner headline greeted readers on April 6 claiming that I had moved a mechanised unit from Hisar and parachute battalion from Agra towards Delhi on January 15. Defence Secretary Shashikant Sharma had to abort his trip to Malaysia and rush back to New Delhi."