Inter Press Service - December 20, 2002
Ranjit Devraj

Much of the hostility revolved around figures released by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in September, which projected the number of HIV/AIDS sufferers in India to reach 25 million people by the end of the decade -- and were unquestioningly picked up by various donors and agencies.

On Wednesday, it was Gere's turn to be grilled at a press conference for citing the CIA's figures that have been challenged by Union Health Minister Shatrughan Sinha as grossly exaggerated and which he said was causing an "AIDS panic" in this country.

Sinha said four million people in India, a country of 1.1 billion people, are known to be infected with the virus and six Indian states do have a "generalised epidemic", according to a sentinel survey carried out by his ministry. "No one else is authorised to release figures or projections," he said.

Told about Sinha's strong views on the subject, Gere responded defensively: "Figures are not the issue, the point is that there's a lot of people. There is very little difference between four million and eight million, ten or 25. It's irrelevant," he said.

Gere said he expected the press to be part of the "coalition of people" that should be fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic. "If you are not here to help, then you are really part of the problem," he told a persistent reporter from the 'Indian Express' newspaper.

But the 'Indian Express' was not alone in questioning the CIA figures and the general conduct of the anti -HIV/AIDS campaign which critics said enriched a handful of voluntary agencies while not really doing very much for the victims.

"While there is no denying the fact that AIDS is an issue that needs to be tackled, we may not rally be doing it the right way. The ICE model -- information, communication and education -- has helped only two types of people, the AIDS bureaucracy and AIDS activists," Soni Sangwan, correspondent for the 'Hindustan Times' newspaper, wrote in an article that appeared on Dec 2.

Sangwan noted that against the vast funds available in the name of four million HIV-positive people, there were 58 million people infected with either Hepatitis-B or Hepatitis-C, diseases against which funds and programmes were grossly inadequate.

"In the last three to four years, we have spent about one billion dollars on AIDS programmes. With only 60 million dollars, we can vaccinate every newborn baby against Hepatitis-B," she lamented in her article, one of several which appeared criticising a 100 million dollar grant to fight HIV/AIDS announced by Microsoft's Bill Gates during a visit to India in November.

Like Gere, Gates was defensive about the CIA figures he had cited in an article that appeared in the 'New York Times' on Nov. 9. He was reduced to saying lamely at a press conference in the Indian capital two days later that that what was important was the disease and not the figures.

The discomfiture of Gates and Gere has much to do with powerful and vigilant voluntary organisations like the Azadi Bachao Andolan (Save Freedom Movement) and the Joint Action Council (JAC), which works in the area of human rights.

Writing in the Hindi-version of the popular investigative weekly 'Outlook', A K Arun Kumar, a medical doctor who is also spokesman for the Azadi Bachao Andolan, accused the CIA of launching a 'new attack 'on India in the name of HIV/AIDS that was aimed at compromising its 'sovereignty.'

Kumar charged the CIA with trying to create panic among the people with exaggerated statistics with an eye to view to building up a market for pharmaceutical transnational corporations (TNCs).

Said Purushottaman Mulloli, who leads the JAC and has approached the courts for a final settlement of the statistics issue: "AIDS is now the safest bet for producers of expensive medicines which never promise a cure because till date, not one study conclusively proves that retro-viral drugs even extend life."

Mulloli pointed out that a large part of the 100 million dollars provided by Bill Gates will go into anti-AIDS drug research and in vaccine trials to be carried out in this country, where legal frameworks are best known for their gaping holes.

Several reputed scientists have pitched into the controversy, questioning the validity of the CIA figures. Among them are Professor Sarman Singh, who heads the department of laboratory medicine at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country's premier medical research and teaching facility.

"The methodology adopted for the statistical and the scientific aspects of the HIV/AIDS programme is scary and needs to be seriously investigated," Singh said.

Manu Kothari, till recently chief of anatomy at the King Edward Memorial Hospital in the western port city of Mumbai, said the fact is that "nobody has been able to isolate the HIV virus and currently used tests are those that detect antibodies that can be triggered off by several other non-viral causes".

Kothari is against the "pharmaceuticalisation" of the problem. "If you say that HIV attacks the immune system, it is no good pumping the human body full of toxins that make it less able to fight off an infection."

Doctors like Kothari and Sarman Singh as well as activists like Mullolli and Arun Kumar have lately begun to attract more attention in the print and electronic media than Gere and Gates with all their millions and glamour.

But also quoted are people like Indira Kapoor, South Asia director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), who attribute the controversy to India's going into "denial mode", and say that as long as people like Gates want to spend their money here, there is no reason to protest.

"If his (Bill Gates's) funding can generate an AIDS vaccine in India, we can save millions of lives. If the possibility of finding a vaccine to prevent infections exists, should we not work towards finding it?" she was quoted as saying in an interview with the 'Pioneer' newspaper.

"For India, the priority, before anything else, is to get our of the denial mode and accept that people have sex, they may get infected by it and that a cure needs to be found for AIDS," she told the paper.
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