Top Army brass have been stung by the decision of a group of officers to get a controversial Left-wing polemicist to speak at the prestigious National Defence College.

Sources said that the decision to get Siddharth Varadarajan, a US citizen and the vanguard of the Left-wing commentariat, one who has consistently been critical of India and thinks Pakistan is the wronged party, has not gone down well with the Army headquarters. Since his ouster from the Hindu newspaper a few years ago, Varadarajan has been running a news portal with the help of money he has collected from millionaires.After the Army used a human shield to protect the lives of innocent citizens during polling day in Srinagar, the portal had an article in which one Partha Chatterjee compared Army Chief General Bipin Rawat to butcher of Jallianwala Bagh and predicting a “General Dyer Moment” in Kashmir in the near future. On his own, Varadarajan has in recent writings equated Kulbhushan Jadhav whose case India fought at the International Court of Justice in The Hague with Farooq Ahmed Dar, the stone pelter whom the Army used as a human shield. “Deterring people from throwing stones at the security forces is a laudable objective but the officer concerned violated the law when he arbitrarily detained Dar and subjected him to this humiliating and degrading treatment,” he proclaimed

Varadarajan’s wife Nandini Sundar has been accused by Chhattisgarh police of being in league with the Left-wing terrorists who have massacred security personnel as well as civilians in the Naxal-infested areas. A recently surrendered Maoist has in fact confessed that he was the intermediary between the Maoist leaders and their sympathisers, one of whom was Sundar.

There is anger and revulsion at the decision to invite him to address the prestigious National Defence College in New Delhi on diplomacy and national Security. “This is inexplicable. We are open to criticism and believe that Army should be exposed to all shades of opinion. But to invite someone who has made it a business to demonise one of the most professional Army is to cross the line, it is nothing less than indulgence of subversion,” said a source in the Army.

Predictably, social media was on overdrive after Varadarajan tweeted that he was “looking forward to addressing Brigadier level officers from the three services at the NDC in Delhi on diplomacy and national security”.

“A lecture of diplomacy and natl security fm a Commie and husband of Naxal sympathiser,” said one tweet. “A Lecture by Hafiz Saeed on counter terrorism to ATS?”

More than 90 per cent of those who replied to his tweet were appalled at the invitation to Varadarajan who has earned a lot of new nicknames today, many that were unprintable. Among the more restrained ones were traitor, anti-Indian, scoundrel, Paki propagandist, terror sympathiser, jihadist and such like.