Speakers said there were no similar icons of solidarity for people suffering from other diseases. The ribbon’s connotations that “HIV=Aids=Death” – the scientific orthodoxy subscribed to by UN agencies, pharmaceutical interests and thousands of activists around the world – was said to further the isolation, discrimination and sense of doom suffered as a result of an HIV diagnosis. Veena Dhari, the first woman in India to declare herself HIV-positive, said that when HIV-positive people see the ribbon “we feel like committing suicide”. She called on all Aids organisations to stop using it.

The story appeared on the front pages of newspapers as well as national television in India, where media have proved more resistant than in most African countries to huge pressures to conform to international opinion on HIV/Aids.

Two years ago Richard Holbrooke, former US Ambassador to the United Nations and now president of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/Aids, an alliance of 200 international companies promoting Aids testing, treatment and support, said in Washington that a major impediment in dealing with Aids globally was that many governments – and people – were still in "a denial phase – they believe they have no Aids problem."

Citing India as an example, he said that if it did not change its policies, it would soon have the highest HIV/Aids tally in the world. By last year that had already happened, according to Richard Feacham, head of the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the main beneficiary of the Product RED initiative.

"The epidemic is growing very rapidly. It is out of control," Feachem said in Paris. "There is nothing happening in India today that is big or serious enough to prevent it." India had to wake up, because without action, "millions and millions and millions are going to die."

That is not the view of Anju Singh, of JACKINDIA, a Delhi-based Aids policy study group. Singh, chief guest at the Bangalore convention, told The Business last week that "there are no reports – not even anecdotal ones – that reflect visible proof of an epidemic in this country." The official estimate for HIV infections is around 5m; but a dearth of Aids cases – averaging 10,000 a year over the past 10 years - suggests that is grossly wrong.

Nor has there been any abnormal increase in death rates, even in suspected "high risk groups" such as red light areas. The Indian government does not publish data for Aids deaths; but "questions we got asked in Parliament have elicited a cumulative figure of 1,100." When UNAIDS published a figure of 310,000 Aids deaths in India in 1999 alone, and a cumulative total of 558,000 Aids orphans, JACKINDIA challenged them publicly. In late 2001 the figures were withdrawn – but only after being used earlier that year to project the state of the epidemic in India at the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/Aids in New York.

"For years now, agencies like the CIA, World Bank, UNDP, UNAIDS, a plethora of NGOs as well as articles published in respected science journals have been talking of an exploding epidemic in India, and Africa-like conditions," Singh said. "We have consistently challenged the agencies that claim India is underplaying figures and is in denial; none of them has been able to provide any alternative data or evidence to substantiate their claims."