The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Pay more for power
Punjab needs to push reforms

Consumers in Punjab hate to pay for power, the supply of which is so irregular, inefficient and unreliable. This summer not only the rains got delayed, the electricity board also decided to skip buying more power, perhaps, to put up a better financial show. Irate consumers thrashed junior power board officials at many places. The board functioning is so pathetic that every year the regulator pulls up the management for inflating losses and fudging the figures. Before abandoning the power reforms mid-way, the government had at least set up the regulatory authority, which, considering all aspects and claims, decides how much increase in the tariff is justified. That is the only solace for the consumer.

However, the power consumer’s anger at the 12.4 per cent increase, that too from a back date, is understandable. Industry is crying foul as power is diverted to ensure smooth paddy sowing every year, causing loss of production and inflating costs. The ruling Akali Dal’s ally, the BJP, which took up the industrial and urban consumers’ cause last year, irritated by the free supply to farmers, has avoided a showdown this time. It should be understood that no service can sustain itself unless it recovers the costs. “Nobody likes paying more, but the rates have to go up to meet the costs”, aptly remarked the regulatory commission’s chairman, Mr Jai Singh Gill. Most consumers may not mind paying a little more if regular supply is ensured.

The root cause of all trouble is that Punjab does not generate enough power. The government has bankrupted itself through populism and extravagance. Its free power bill has risen to Rs 3,143 crore a year. Free power and political interference have crippled the board, financially and administratively. There is no alternative to implementing the power reforms, which aim at splitting the board, making each entity self-sufficient, viable and accountable and stopping political meddling. The vested interests, no wonder, are resisting the reforms.

This is Chandigarh!
The day the mob ruled the city

IT was a veritable mob rule in Chandigarh on Tuesday when thousands of activists of the BKU and several other Punjab-based organisations, and employees of the PSEB descended on the city and turned it into a no-holds-barred battleground. They beat up the badly outnumbered police officials and commandos, destroyed government and private property, teased women and caused mayhem. Photographs of policemen crying for mercy told the story. Many of the protesters were heavily drunk and made a nuisance of themselves wherever they went. If this can happen in the capital of two states, Punjab and Haryana, and the UT, one can well imagine what havoc marauding mobs can cause in mofussil towns.

Chandigarh is hardly the size of a sub-tehsil and is top heavy with an Administrator with a Governor’s rank leading its administration replete with senior bureaucrats. Yet, this is the kind of law and order the city has to live with. The blame lies squarely at the door of the administration. Allowing so many organisations to converge on the Capital on a single day was wrong in itself even if all of them were protesting against the privatisation of the PSEB. If they came defying the laws, it was the administration’s duty to keep them away from the centre of the city. Yet, they freely came to Sector 16-17 and caused mayhem. They continued their depredations in many other sectors like 15, 23 and 24.

All reports point that it was a pre-planned attack by the protesters. Under such circumstances, it is the organisers who must be given due punishment for this unpardonable act. Just because there are far too many protesters does not mean that they should all be allowed to go scot-free. Given the photographic record of the violent incidents, it should not be too difficult to identify the actual criminals also and to punish them severely. If they get away with what they did, they can be depended on to repeat their activities. As it is, they have all been coming to Chandigarh way too often to disrupt normal activity and hold the capital to ransom at the slightest provocation.

Thought for the Day

He was a man, take him for all in all, / I shall not look upon his like again.
— William Shakespeare

ARTICLE

Pak enhancing N-capability
It’s bound to cause arms’ race in S. Asia
by Gen V.P. Malik (retd)

TWO recent reports published in the US media should be a cause for concern for those looking for stability in the security relations in the subcontinent. The first report carried in The New York Times by two well-established journalists accuses Pakistan of illegally modifying US-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles to expand its capability to strike targets on land. This should be viewed as complementing the sizable land-based missile arsenal that Pakistan has already developed with the help from China and North Korea. Pakistan is also accused of modifying US-made P-3C naval aircraft for land attack missions. According to the report, the US has taken up this issue at the highest level in Pakistan because it violates the US Arms Control Export Act and its “end-use” law.

Development of a short-range land-attack missile from a naval aircraft or a ship, whether developed through reverse engineering of the Harpoon anti-ship missile or separately, will enhance the threat to India’s coastline.

The second report originated through a paper published in the credible Bulletin for Atomic Scientists. The paper states that Pakistan is enhancing its (nuclear) capabilities across the board. Its nuclear warhead arsenal has increased in quantity — from 60 weapons last year to 70-90 now — as well as in quality. Pakistan is miniaturising nuclear warheads by using plutonium. Two new plutonium production reactors and a second chemical separation facility are under construction. These new facilities will provide the Pakistani military with several options: fabricating weapons that use plutonium cores; mixing plutonium with HEU to make composite cores, and/or use tritium to boost warheads’ yield. And new nuclear-capable ballistic missiles are being readied for deployment; two more missiles are under development.

It is necessary to mention here that the development and deployment of Pakistan’s nuclear and missile capabilities are controlled by its military. The civilian political leadership has little clues about it. In the 1980s, the then Pakistan Army Chief, Gen Aslam Beg, had declined permission to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to visit Pakistan’s nuclear facility!

India and Pakistan follow different nuclear doctrines. The Indian doctrine emphasises self-defence and, therefore, possession of a credible minimum deterrence to deter the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons against India. The weapons are to be used in retaliation mode only after we have absorbed the first strike from an adversary. Such a deterrence capability requires (a) sufficient, survivable nuclear forces which are well trained and operationally well prepared, (b) a robust command and control organisation, to be headed by a civilian authority which should have the will to employ nuclear forces in retaliation mode, and (c) effective intelligence and surveillance capability. This retributive “second strike” capability is based on a counter-value strategy, which is supposed to serve the nuclear deterrence purpose against Pakistan as well as China.

Pakistan has not declared its nuclear doctrine. But its military has repeatedly stated that its nuclear weapons are aimed solely at India. Pakistan does not follow “no first use” policy, so that it can readdress India’s conventional forces superiority. Its reaction in a crisis situation will be “very quick”. In 2002, the Director of Pakistan’s Strategic Plan Division had stated that “at the moment”, nuclear artillery (tactical nuclear warheads with small yield) was not part of their nuclear programme.

How is India affected by these latest reports from the US?

Firstly, the increased quantity and quality of Pakistan’s nuclear warheads and delivery systems create an immediate imbalance in nuclear weapons capabilities and, therefore, the level of deterrence. It is bound to cause a nuclear arms race in the subcontinent.

Secondly, Pakistan’s stronger nuclear capability increases the likelihood of Kargil-type incursions, a low-intensity conflict and a proxy war with India. It was precisely such confidence along with the thought that India will not dare a conventional war response which made Gen Pervez Musharraf and his army colleagues venture into the Kargil sector incursion in 1999.

Thirdly, the violation of the US Arms Control Export Act and its “end-use” law by Pakistan will affect Indo-US relations. The US statements that its financial aid and sale of defence weapons and equipment to Pakistan is only to enhance its counter-terrorism capability, or that it is selling only defensive weapons, cannot be taken seriously. It would be a repeat of what India has suffered before the 1965 war, and again in the 1980s when the US deliberately ignored the development of Pakistan’s nuclear capability and transfer of ballistic missiles from China and North Korea to pursue its anti-Soviet objective in Afghanistan. India may even have to reconsider some of its defence purchases from the US. The US tries to make much distinction between defensive and offensive weapon systems for assistance to Pakistan, but in a conflict situation such a distinction has no validity.

Before the Kargil war, when Prime Minister Vajpayee visited Lahore in February 1999, India and Pakistan had signed a memorandum of understanding “to adopt measures for promoting a stable environment of peace and security between the two countries”. Its first paragraph had stated that “the two sides shall engage in bilateral consultations on security concepts and nuclear doctrines with a view to developing measures for confidence building in the nuclear and conventional fields aimed at avoidance of conflict.” The Pakistan Army did not believe in such a relationship and waged the Kargil war.

Pakistan’s proxy war against India continues, whether it is Mumbai or targets in Jammu and Kashmir, violating the agreed ceasefire. That leaves no chance for a genuine dialogue between India and Pakistan for “a stable environment of peace and security”. Under such conditions, it would be a foolhardy to ignore the latest revelations about Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities.

The writer, a former Chief of Army Staff, is currently President, ORF Institute of Security Studies, New Delhi.

MIDDLE

In secret service
by Jupinderjit Singh

A train journey provides the best opportunity to read a book at leisure. For the last year or so, I have got many such chances, thanks to my different postings.

I usually read a book about the new place of posting to get acquainted with its history and culture. But crime and spy novels have remained my all-time favourites.

Not any more.

I would now think twice before reading a spy novel while travelling in a train. One almost took me behind bars a few days ago.

It was Mitch Silver’s “In Secret Service”, a gripping historical mystery on well known writer Ian Fleming’s world of spies. Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and Mitch Silver would never have imagined their celebrated works could put an “innocent reader” in such trouble.

I remained engrossed in reading while travelling in an AC coach of the Swaraj Express from Ludhiana to Jammu. When I alighted at Jammu station with a bag on my right shoulder, a cop started walking close to me. As I reached the outer gate after walking for nearly 500 metres, he stopped me.

“Open your bag.” He ordered. “Why.” I asked, “What happened?”

“JK Police. We can search any suspect.” Two other cops surrounded me.

“Suspect? Me? Hey, there seems to be some mistake,” I tried to reason.

“Shut up,” said a rifle-wielding cop in a highly excited tone as if he had caught Charles Sobhraj on the run. Anand Sharma, our photographer at Jammu, had come to pick me up in his car. He came running: “Hey, stop that nonsense, you know who we are?” He said taking out his mobile phone and dialling the number of the SSP, “I will get you suspended right now.” He threatened.

“You talk to whoever you want,” the cops said pushing me slightly away from the bag.

“Was it this”, he picked up the book “In Secret Service” among other books and asked the cop who was the first to follow me. I then remembered I had seen him in my coach also. They then spoke in Dogri or some other language. The excited cop seemed to be disgusted at the other one. I could make out they thought I was some spy who was reading some classified documents.

But would anyone do it openly in a train?

They then found a multi-vitamin bottle that required the lid to be pressed down to open.

The cops refused to press it, thinking it might be an improvised grenade. I pressed and opened it. “You want me to gulp one tablet also?” I asked much to their discomfort.

They hurriedly fled, still puzzled about their own actions. “Hey, you haven’t frisked me. I could be hiding something in my brief or socks. At least see my I-card, buddies.” I said evoking laughter from a crowd that had gathered there.

I vowed never to read a spy novel in a train again. Who knows which “brilliant” cop would give me a thrashing before finding the truth! This time, it only ended in an embarrassment and a hearty laugh.

OPED

Nothing to worry about changes in Harpoon
by Premvir Das

THE recent reports that Pakistan has modified its ship/submarine/aircraft-fitted Harpoon anti-ship missiles (supplied by the USA) to enable attacks on targets on land have caused some consternation. It is necessary to look dispassionately at the issues involved in the alleged modifications assuming that some have been made.

There are three aspects meriting consideration: one, the purpose of the modifications, two their feasibility and finally, breach of contract with the supplier country. As far as the first is concerned, every credible military will seek to get the best out of what it has; if it does not, it fails in one of its prime responsibilities.

In 1968 the Soviets sold us some missile boats. In their doctrine, these were to be deployed close to the coast to deter enemy attacks.

Soviet Admiral Gorshkov, who enthusiastically supported this acquisition, said that the Indian Navy could now easily prevent raids of the type carried out by a lone Pakistani warship off the Saurashtra coast during the 1965 war.

But within a year of acquiring these potent boats, the Indian Navy was practising something entirely different. And, when war broke out in 1971, these boats were not deployed in defence of our own coast but to attack that of the enemy.

They had a limited range but to overcome this handicap they were towed by the bigger warships and then let loose on an unsuspecting adversary with results which are now folklore. Even the supplier Navy was taken by surprise by the audacity of this move. But this was not enough.

The Indian Navy wanted missile capability in its ocean-going ships, so missile launchers and associated radars and control systems were physically lifted out of two missile boats and of the eight launch tubes thus available, six were installed and interfaced on two frigates and two in the coast battery in then Bombay. All this was done on our own.

Later, recognising operational weakness in not having anti-ship missiles in its long range aircraft, serious efforts were made to integrate the British Sea Eagle missile with the Soviet IL 38 surveillance aircraft.

The Navy has had a very competent set-up in place for decades to arrange interface of weapons and sensors acquired from different sources. This entire activity, of constantly working on upgraded operational exploitation of whatever weaponry one has, is part and parcel of the military function and, if the Pakistan Navy has been about this work, it has acted like any other of its counterparts.

The next proposition is that the modifications carried out will permit attacks from sea on land targets. This has no rationale because all anti-ship missiles can be fired against land targets.

The data to launch these missiles against ships includes the range and direction of the target and its movement so that future positions can be calculated by the fire control computers. The data can either come from one’s own radars or from those of a supporting aircraft. Nearing the target, the missile’s nose radar becomes operative. It locks on to the strongest echo received and then homes on to it.

This is true of the Harpoon missile as it is of any of our own missiles of that category. The missile can also be exploited on less information which will affect its accuracy. For example, it can be launched just in a given direction.

When its radar is activated, it will home on to any echo received. If none is, it will continue in the direction fired and either explode at the end of its fuel, wherever, or go to any targets on land which provide echoes as metallic structures do.

This is how, in 1971, missiles fired from one of our missile boats hit the oil tanks in Karachi and created the huge conflagration that they did.

There is no real certainty about the result but anything could happen. This is possible with Harpoon missiles as with any others, so there is nothing new.

As for range enhancement, this is not so easy. Any increase will need augmented fuel. Since the booster is essentially needed, this is possible only if the war head size is reduced; with an already small 200 kg warhead (against 400 kg in Russian missiles), no one would want this punch reduced.

So, the options are few. One can, of course, increase the overall dimensions of the missile and, therefore, weight, but that will need new launchers; it will be a different system altogether.

All this for a missile whose range is around 50 miles at the most seems somewhat odd. There would be more value for money in doing something with the 300 km M11 missiles which Pakistan already has to adapt for use from the sea.

The Indian Navy is now fitting its ships with missiles of this about range but has never tried to tinker with the shorter range anti-ship Russian missiles of the Harpoon category.

What then is the issue might well be asked. Repeatedly, despite India’s protestations, the Americans have supplied potent weapon systems to Pakistan, most recently, to provide capabilities in the “War against Terror”.

Yet all weaponry supplied earlier, and now being provided as military aid under this umbrella, has been and is being used by Pakistan to confront us.

When India signs an End User Verification Agreement or any other contract, it can be taken for granted that its provisions will be strictly enforced but when Pakistan signs on the line, it is just a piece of paper.

For their own reasons, and for many years, the Americans have regularly turned a blind eye to such things. It is, therefore, timely that truth has come in the public domain.

One can only hope that it will be pursued vigorously by the Americans and will persuade them to look at the entire issue of military aid to Pakistan with greater clarity.

It is for this reason, more than for others, that we should welcome the pressure that is being mounted on Pakistan and do whatever we can to have its intensity enhanced.

Cynics might argue that this is just ‘déjà vu’. Even allowing for the logic of this position, there is a difference. India is now a credible buyer in the US arms market which has its own momentum. The challenge to our diplomacy is to recognise this power and, then, to integrate it with issues which impact on our national interests.

The writer is a former Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Naval Command

AIDS more frightening than HIV
by John-Manuel Andriote

THE Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifies someone with HIV as having AIDS if the T-cell count – the white blood cells that HIV attacks – drops even once below 200; if the T-cells make up only 14 percent of all white blood cells; or if the person has one of about 26 "AIDS-defining" infections that prey on a weakened immune system.

If you think it doesn't matter whether you are described as HIV-positive or having AIDS, think again. I should know. Shortly after I was hit with the news that I had tested HIV-positive in 2005, I was hit again with a test result showing I had a T-cell count of only 198.

"That's an AIDS diagnosis!" I exclaimed to my doctor. Learning I was HIV-positive was shocking enough. Confronting the fact that I would always bear the highly charged, confusing and stigmatized label of "AIDS" was overwhelming.

Nearly four years later, antiretroviral therapy and good health care have strengthened my immune system. My viral load is undetectable. If I didn't know that I have HIV, I wouldn't know because I have never been sick.

Yet I'm dismayed to think I am still considered a "person with AIDS."

In the early 1980s, gay men with AIDS insisted they be called "people with AIDS" rather than "AIDS victims." The word "victim" implied helplessness. It didn't convey their determination to fight their illness and reject the shame the public expected them to feel for having the deadly sexually transmitted disease.

Today, when it is possible to live well and long with HIV, the very term AIDS seems to have outlived its usefulness – and causes unnecessary confusion.

In 1988, the Presidential Commission on the HIV Epidemic stated that, "The term `AIDS' is obsolete. ... Continual focus on AIDS rather than the entire spectrum of HIV disease has left our nation unable to deal adequately with the epidemic."

Yet some agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, persist in using the term.

Keith Henry, a medical professor at the University of Minnesota and a physician specializing in HIV care, said the term AIDS "still has great value epidemiologically" in tracking how well (or not) HIV-positive people are being brought into care. He says it's also useful in helping a doctor know whether a HIV patient has had serious immune damage, even if the patient has recovered.

In the early years of the HIV epidemic, people typically didn't learn they had the virus until they were seriously ill. Henry explains that most AIDS diagnoses in the U.S. today are based on a low T-cell count.

"We're in a different age," said Frank Oldham Jr., president of the National Association of People with AIDS. "Telling people they have an AIDS diagnosis and will `always have AIDS' is going to devastate the person emotionally. So you need to have language that encourages people to stay in treatment and shows they can get better."

Regan Hofmann, the HIV-positive editor in chief of POZ, a magazine about living with HIV, agrees.

"AIDS is a more frightening word than HIV," she said. "HIV is associated with a more modern era with people being able to be healthy on treatment."

Yet even in this different, modern era, no one until recently addressed the psychological effect of carrying the AIDS diagnosis, according to Marshall Forstein, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chairman of the American Psychiatric Association's Steering Committee on HIV Psychiatry.

San Francisco HIV specialist Christopher Hall calls the use of the term AIDS in this way a "vestige" of the epidemic's early days. Hall prefers to "deal plainly with the facts of what someone's T-cell count means in terms of the status of their disease." Although he says doctors recognize the meaningful difference between a T-cell count above or below 200, "I work hard to disabuse patients from the view that if they have well-managed HIV and they are adherent to their meds, they have AIDS."

From a legal point of view, people with HIV – regardless of the stage of infection – are considered disabled and protected against discrimination under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

"The courts don't understand the medicine and get things wrong," said Bebe J. Anderson, HIV Project director for Lambda Legal. She adds that discrimination against people with HIV isn't based on the status of their infection. "The effects of HIV on people can be different," she explained, "but the social effects are the same because it's based on HIV."

I choose not to call myself a "person with AIDS" because I don't believe the term accurately describes my health status. I don't feel the need for the additional political empowerment it conveyed to my early-1980s predecessors. And I surely don't want to invite additional stigma.

Instead, I choose to say, "I am living well with HIV," as Goulda A. Downer, principal investigator of the National Minority AIDS Education and Training Center at Howard University College of Medicine, recommends.

Isn't it time, more than 20 years after the presidential commission called the term AIDS obsolete, to retire it and use language that is both medically accurate and less stigmatizing? It is challenging enough merely to live with well-managed HIV. Why make it even harder by insisting that those of us with the virus forever bear our own scarlet letter?

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

Health
Do mobile phones cause cancer?
by Thomas H. Maugh II

In the most recent instance of the triumph of wishful thinking over basic physics, a "collaboration of international EMF activists" last week released a report repeating the tired argument that "cell phones cause brain tumors."

Their evidence: Studies discrediting the link between cell-phone radiation and tumors were funded by telecommunications companies, which deliberately excluded data that might have shown a link.

Many people probably first heard about the "risk" of cell phones when David Raynard, whose wife died of brain cancer, appeared on "Larry King Live" in 1993 to support his lawsuit claiming that the tumor had been caused by her cell phone. His evidence: "She held it against her head and talked on it all the time."

More recently, King hosted three neurosurgeons who said they would never place a cell phone against their head because of the risk. They may be good neurosurgeons, but apparently they flunked physics.

Cancer occurs when cellular DNA is disrupted, producing mutant strands of DNA. That is true for carcinogens, viruses and radiation.

All radiation is composed of photons, and the energy they contain depends on the wavelength of the radiation. Yellow light has a frequency of 5 x 1014 Hz and is not powerful enough to break DNA bonds. Otherwise, we would have to sit around in darkened rooms all the time.

The frequency of a typical cell phone is about 1 x 109 Hz, while that used in a household microwave oven is 2.45 x 1012 Hz. In other words, the radiation from a microwave oven packs only a thousandth of the energy of yellow light, while that from a cell phone packs a millionth of the energy. (See, for example, the September/October issue of Skeptical Inquirer.) The energy of EMF radiation from power lines – also a bugaboo of the EMF activists – has a million-fold less energy than a cell phone.

That is nowhere near enough energy to break bonds in DNA. For a microwave oven, it would be like trying to cut barbed wire with plastic scissors. For a cell phone, it would be more like paper scissors. And for EMF from power lines, in the words of New Yorkers, fuhgeddaboutit.

And if that isn't enough, Danish researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 2001 on a study of half a million cell-phone users in that country, linking computerized records of cell-phone use to cancer databases.

The result: no detectable risk. An editorial in the same journal by physicist Robert L. Park of the University of Maryland summarized the evidence against a potential link. Many other studies have found the same results – which is to be expected if the laws of physics do, in fact, hold in this universe.

And as for those YouTube videos purporting to show cell phones popping corn: They're fake. Cardo Systems, a manufacturer of Bluetooth headpieces for cell phones, has admitted that it created the videos to scare consumers and encourage them to buy its products. The effect was created by dropping popped corn on the table, then editing out the unpopped kernels.

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post