Letter of the Week

Since some offices of the Express are closed for Diwali on Friday, we are carrying our ‘Letter of the Week’ award announcement a day in advance.

Since some offices of the Express are closed for Diwali on Friday, we are carrying our ‘Letter of the Week’ award announcement a day in advance. The winner this week is Pusegaon-based Shivajirao G. Jadhav ‘Great tinkers’. He wrote that since there is no email facility where he is located he had to send his letter by post. We thank him for the effort he took to join in an important national debate.

•I am of the opinion that the nuclear deal fiasco has been caused by policy discordance among the key players. It is a case of ‘many men, many minds’ or, rather, ‘many parties, many strategies’! But this doesn’t mean that the party is greater than the country. After all, parties are only a device to enable national development. These party leaders are all great thinkers, so why do they remain indifferent to the merits of the nuclear agreement? Just recently, Mohammad ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that the deal would end India’s nuclear isolation. In any case, India needs all the energy it can muster, from all possible sources, and nuclear energy may be the right choice, given global warming.

Certainly, both the BJP and the Leftists must introspect. Their stances do not stand the test of reason.

Army’s grip

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•Raja Mohan must be congratulated on his excellent analysis of the circumstances leading to the imposition of emergency in Pakistan ‘Musharraf’s maelstrom and India’, although he has been charitable enough not to treat this as an act of self-preservation by the general as maintained in your editorial. Only time will tell how long Pervez Musharraf will be able to continue the emergency and whether he will succeed in consolidating the troublesome border areas. However, I differ with Raja

Mohan on two counts. His advice to the government to render discreet help to Pakistan has to be weighed carefully. Looking at the past, it is doubtful whether such a step will help to soften that country’s animosity towards India.

Further, things in Pakistan have reached such a terrible stage that the so-called democratic forces in Pakistan, if they want to succeed, would have to turn to the very same army to quell the unrest.

— V. Subramanian

Ahmedabad

Clarification

•This is with reference to the news item, ‘Deal can bring back n-power units to full operating capacity: NPCIL Chief’. We wish to clarify NPCIL is in no way associated with the Indo-US nuclear deal and is not in a position to comment on it. Quoting Dr S.K. Jain, CMD, NPCIL, on the influence of the deal was not appropriate. The existing nuclear power plants are being operated at a lower capacity factor as a part of strategy to take care of the temporary mismatch between supply and demand. We hope that with the above the issue stands closed.

— A.I. Siddiqui

DGM (CC), NPCIL

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Reporter Amitabh Sinha replies: In an email response to a question whether the nuclear deal would have made any difference to operating capacities of the nuclear power plants in the country, most of which are currently running at nearly half their capacities, Dr S.K. Jain mentioned that “access to global nuclear technology”, besides helping the nuclear power base quickly, “would have opened possibilities of quicker recovery of operating units to their rated capacities…” But access to global nuclear technology can be possible only through the nuclear deal.

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