“… the National AIDS Control
Organisation (NACO) has decided to set up permanent camps at certain locations.
The mobile camps are set up four times a month, each screening high-risk
individuals such as sex workers, migrants, drug users, truck drivers, men
having sex with men and construction labourers. The Govandi slum has some
15,000 migrant labourers, mostly from UP, Bihar and Nepal, who live in
matchbox-size rooms.”
–
The Sunday Express, 29 November, 2015
and
“There
are no bio-medical or physiological factors which make some groups rather than
others more prone to HIV infection. Contrary to popular fantasy, the modes of
transmission of HIV put many more people at risk than the label “high-risk
group” implies. It is
not what you are but what you do, and what blood-banks and blood product
manufacturers and hospitals do, that constitutes the primary risk factor. It
therefore becomes crucial to understand the spread of HIV in terms of activities
and not groups which are at high-risk.”
– Extracts from ‘Women & AIDS - Denial and Blame,’ 1990
On the eve of World AIDS Day,
December 1, 2015, AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan is releasing the digitized
version of its very first report titled “Women & AIDS – Denial and
Blame”, twenty-five years after it was first published. The report is as
relevant today as it was when it was first brought out. The above two quotes
bear testimony to this.
In 1988, a group of Delhi-based voluntary workers involved in
community work in education, health, law, women’s and gay issues came together
over the plight of women working in G.B. Road, Delhi’s red-light area. In 1990
the group released this Citizens’ report. This was probably the first such report
in India which documents the discrimination of HIV+ and AIDS patients as also
of women in sex work. This group immediately after the release of the report
organized itself into AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (AIDS Anti-Discrimination
Movement, ABVA) a non-funded, non-party organization. Till 2013 ABVA had shied
away from the digital world because of its penchant for romance of the printed
word!
An update is in order. In March
1990, the Delhi Police acquired notoriety when they ‘arrested’ 112 children of
women in prostitution on the charge of being ‘neglected juveniles’, simply
because their mothers were sex workers. The raid and its aftermath are
documented in detail in the report. However, even after the Juvenile Welfare
Board pronounced that the children were not neglected, the State went in
appeal. The appeal was dismissed in March 1995 with the help of legal
assistance provided by Shobha Aggarwal, advocate and member, ABVA.
Efforts to digitize the reports
of ABVA have been undertaken as not much has changed in the last 25 years. The
discrimination faced by HIV+ persons in India at the hands of the authorities
is as rampant today as it was when the report was first brought out. Though not
headline-hogging anymore, occasionally reports appear in the print media about
such instances. In mid 2015 an instance of a 7 year old HIV+ student was
reported; he was asked to leave school for being HIV+ in Bishmpur area of
South-24 Parganas District in West Bengal, India. The boy’s maternal
grandmother a teacher in the same school was forced to take a HIV test. The
boy’s mother too had tested positive in January, 2015 and is now working with
an NGO engaged in spreading awareness about HIV. The mother was earlier told by
the school authorities that they were planning to set up a different room for
the boy where he will sit alone away from others. In November 2015, the boy was
allowed entry to the school; he said:
“I have packed
my bag and taken out my uniform, my diary, my notebook and all other things are
inside. I am so excited because I will meet my friends.”
Hopefully he will not be isolated
in the classroom.
This child, his mother and
grandmother were discriminated against because 100 odd parents of other school
children had petitioned that the HIV+ child be asked to leave the school or
they wouldn’t allow their wards to study there. Not just the authorities but
the members of the local community harbour unfounded biases against HIV+
persons. No one has been taken to task for this discrimination. In a country
where untouchability has a scriptural sanction of more than two millennium, the
discrimination is embedded in the minds.
Only typographical errors of
original printed report of 1990 have been rectified. Read the report here:
AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan
Email:
aidsbhedbhavvirodhiandolan@gmail.com
