AIDS activist violated - solidarity with SANGRAM and VAMP

[Guest guest]

Dear Friends,

This letter attempts to bring to the fore certain issues that the recent

incident of SANGRAM in Nippani has opened up.

The SANGRAM episode as reported by the concerned activists needs to be

addressed as a violation of the basic human rights of a group of

individuals, in this case commercial sex workers, by law enforcing

agencies which seem to have viewed such violation as their prerogative.

Placed within a broader perspective, it prompts us to question the basis

for a judgmental approach that applauds the so-called ‘pure’, ‘chaste’

and ‘sacred’ attributes of certain sections of women while denigrating

certain other sections as ‘hardcore prostitutes’, ‘bloody veshyas’,

etc. It raises fundamental issues of patriarchy and gender

inequalities and a code of masculinity that sanctions control over and

ill-treatment of women in general and of marginalised groups of women in

particular.

The third major issue is this kind of hostility towards AIDS workers

vis-a-vis the government's avowed policy of fighting AIDS.

While we condemn the violation of basic human rights based on

discriminatory social norms that deny respectability to a means of

livelihood into which women are pushed, mostly against their own

volition, we must ask the question: How do we break into this social

conditioning and enlist the cooperation of everyone in the fight against

the HIV epidemic? The whole issue also needs careful consideration of

how not to further marginalise sex workers, whose access to information,

health services, protection from violence and support is already

minimal. This sort of exclusionary approach would only aggravate the

driving of vulnerable populations further underground, and thereby pave

the way to rendering the epidemic even more out of control, by putting

them out of the purview of effective intervention efforts and

behavioural change to adopt safer options.

It is in this context that we express solidarity with SANGRAM (we have

sent a protest letter to Mr. S.M. Krishna), in condemning the human

rights violations that have taken place, and also in sensitising law

enforcers to take a practical and strategic viewpoint rather than a

moralistic one in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The whole question of

sexuality has so far remained in the private domain and shrouded in

archaic notions, and at this juncture the need is to place the whole

issue in the public domain for discussion/discourse. There is also the

much more pertinent need to review the laws relating to sexuality, as

they impinge on the HIV epidemic. We are with all those groups that see

these as the primary challenges.

Radhika Ramasubban Researchers from the Centre for Social and Technological

Change, Mumbai.

E-mail: <soctec@...>

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