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RIGHTS-INDIA: Communities Rally around HIV/AIDS Widows
By Puran Singh
BHATINDA, India, Dec 31 (IPS) - Life could not have looked any bleaker for
Manpreet, 28, when she and three of her four young daughters were found
HIV-positive in April, not too long after her truck driver husband died
possibly of AIDS.
''When Raju (her husband) died of suspected AIDS, last year, we did not
think that he would leave us this terrible legacy - we are doomed,'' says
Manpreet, who has been seeking shelter in her father's single-room house
ever since she and her daughters were thrown out by her in-laws.
Manpreet and her daughters were tested by the Guru Gobind Singh Medical
College at Faridkot, 50 km north of the quiet town of Rampura Phool in
western Punjab state where she lives.
As soon as word got around regarding their status, her elder girls,
Karanjeet, 10 and Lakhvir, 7 were thrown out of the local school because
the authorities said they posed a threat to the health of other students.
In June, her four-month-old, Gurupreet, died. That was when her
father-in-law insisted that she and the other children leave his home,
highlighting how the social burdens that women have can be exacerbated by
the stigma attached to HIV/AIDS.
But through the shame and stigma that comes from the disease associated
so closely with the taboo-ridden subject of sex, Manpreet found unexpected
support from the Rampura Phool Mohalla (locality) Development Committee,
the small town's local body.
''Whatever happens, we will not let Manpreet and her family get isolated
- they are innocent,'' declares P S Mannu, the 'pradhan' (elected leader)
of the committee.
With the flowing beard and turban of Sikhism, the predominant faith in
these parts, Mannu said he was shocked by the ''callousness and even
hostility'' with which Manpreet was treated by the Bhatinda district
authorities.
''What is the use of all their fancy posters and speeches on HIV/AIDS
when they have no mechanism to help someone like Manpreet. Why did they
test her and her daughters and then abandon them to die?'' he demands to
know.
Mannu and the town committee have sought the support of the Joint Action
Council (JAC), a New Delhi-based group specialising in legal and rights
issues around HIV/AIDS, to secure justice for Manpreet and her
near-destitute family through the courts.
Says Purushottaman Mulloli, who leads the JAC: ''Manpreet's case is not
uncommon and it only confirms what we have been saying for nearly a decade
that the millions of dollars that are pouring into the country through
bilateral, multilateral and various private donor agencies are only helping
to create scare and panic within local communities.''
Mullolli said that as a result of a ''misguided'' campaign, so-called
high-risk groups such as truck drivers and sex workers are getting further
marginalised. ''This has the potential of leading to serious social unrest
as evidenced by several incidents of ostracism reported from across the
country.''
According to Mannu, Manpreet and her family were forced to undergo HIV
tests by people acting on behalf of her father-in-law, who has made no
secret of his reluctance to support his son's widow and her children.
Punjab and neighbouring Haryana, farming states that also produce the
bulk of the country's truck drivers and soldiers, are now the settings for
a vigorous campaign urging young people to get themselves tested for HIV -
even though no one quite knows what course of action to follow if the
results show positive.
The 'sarpanch' (headman) of Manke village in Ludhiana, Gurmukh Singh,
revels in the enhanced power and authority he enjoys when it comes to
approving marriages that HIV testing confers on him. ''We do not allow
marriages to be solemnised here until the bride and groom are tested
first,'' he says.
No on dares question his autocratic ways, not only because of age-old
tradition but also because a number of deaths that have occurred in Manke
and nearby Dhaibee village have been attributed - rightly or wrongly - to
HIV/AIDS.
Trucking, which demands long hours at the wheel for impossibly low
wages, is the main profession of young men in both villages. Gurmukh Singh
says many of them could be HIV-positive, though testing methods leave a lot
to be desired.
Gurinder Singh, a resident of Amritsar, knows how tricky some testing
methods can be. He had decided to get himself tested only to be told by a
laboratory run by a large pharmaceutical firm that he was HIV-positive.
''I became suicidal and would have been dead except for a doctor friend
who encouraged me to travel to New Delhi and get more accurate tests done
at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where tests conducted
showed negative,'' he says.
Gurinder Singh has petitioned the National AIDS Control Organisation
(NACO), under the Ministry of Health, to stop its aggressive testing policy
until more reliable methods are developed to avoid needless trauma and
social ostracism.
But the testing campaign continues, especially among groups like truck
drivers because of popular notions that they are canny about where the
cheapest food and sex are available along routes that stretch can over
thousands of kilometres and take weeks to traverse.
'Targeted interventions' promoted by NACO consist largely of
distributing free condoms and literature and subsidised HIV tests. But the
organisation, which spends 60 million dollars worth of funds annually from
the World Bank alone, has not earmarked anything for widows or dependents
of truckers.
When Manpreet and her daughters, supported by Mannu and the local
committee, staged a sit-in strike at the Bhatinda headquarters, the
officials relented to the extent of providing her two blankets worth less
than 50 cents.
Because officials are indifferent to widows' plight, it has been left to
bewildered but caring 'panchayat' (elected village body) in Punjab and
Haryana to pick up the pieces left behind by well-funded but insensitive
campaigns that emphasise 'information education and counselling' - and
little else.
Startlingly similar to Manpreet's case is that of Kaushalya and her
daughter who were declared HIV-positive at a government medical college in
Rohtak city, Haryana, five years ago, after tests she was made to undergo
because her trucker husband Ranbir was suspected to have died of AIDS.
''The doctors at the Rohtak hospital made me abort my unborn son, but a
second test I took in 2000 proved that neither I nor my daughter were HIV
positive,'' Kaushalya says. ''I lost my son and watched my family and my
entire village of Chochi being boycotted. For years no one would marry from
Chochi or give jobs to anyone form the village.''
Luckily for Kaushalya, her father-in-law stood beside her like a rock as
did the Chochi 'panchayat', led by its 'sarpanch' Azad Singh.
''They terrorised us into undergoing testsà. the district commissioner
himself came here and said we were all going to die unless we took the
test,'' Azad Singh recalls. ''It is all a big hoax being played on us by
big people in the cities.'' (END/2002)
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