HEALTH-INDIA: Archaic Laws Put AIDS Activists’ Work at Risk

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 15 2001 (IPS) - Activists fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India are in increasing danger of being arrested by police and put away for weeks under archaic, British colonial laws on obscenity and homosexuality.

Currently incarcerated are four volunteers of the Naz Foundation International and the Bharosa (trust) who were arrested in Lucknow, capital of northern Uttar Pradesh state, on Jul. 7 under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which among others criminalises homosexual intercourse.

While the British have long since removed this archaic section from their own penal code, it continues to be valid in India and is regularly used to harass people with a different sexual orientation and those working with them.

On Monday, several non-government organisations (NGOs) staged a sit-in strike in the national capital to demand the release of the four volunteers and five other people who were arrested in Lucknow following a raid on the offices of NAZ International and Bharosa.

Following the raid, police in Lucknow announced recovery of “pornographic material” from the premises of the two NGOs and charged those arrested with running a “gay club”.

“It is quite natural to find educational material on safe sex and condoms at the premises of a voluntary organisation dealing with HIV/AIDS,” said Lok Prakash, a representative of the NFI at Monday’s sit-in.

Prakash said the raids were only the latest in a series of repressive measures against NGOs in Uttar Pradesh working in the area of sexual and reproductive health as well as human rights. Uttar Pradesh is India’s largest state with a population of 150 million people.

According to Anand Grover, director of the Lawyers’ Collective, a New Delhi-based NGO that deals with legal aspects concerning HIV/AIDS, the raids and arrests were discriminatory against sexual minorities and seriously hampered the work of NGOs in containing the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Men who prefer other men have been identified as a group vulnerable to the virus and organisations which work with this group have to use explicit material for educative purposes, Grover said.

“If you are to communicate messages, you cannot do it without such material — by seizing such material as pornographic and obscene amounts to denial of the right to accurate information and pushes the HIV/AIDS epidemic underground,” Grover said.

The arrests appeared to contradict the ‘targeted intervention’ strategy for the year-old, second phase of the World Bank-funded National AIDS Control Programme (NACP), which provides for identifying groups vulnerable to HIV and peer education and outreach among these groups.

In fact, a third of the 229 million U.S. dollars that is to be spent on the second phase, in which the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the British Department for International Development (DfID) are major contributors, is earmarked for ‘targeted interventions for high risk groups.’

During the United Nations General Assembly on AIDS (UNGASS) in New York, last month, the Indian delegation expressly recognised homosexuals as a marginalised community that is critically affected by the epidemic and deserves support.

The central government’s National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) estimates that already 3.7 million people are living with HIV/AIDS in the country and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has himself prescribed breaking taboos surrounding the open discussion of sexual health as a means of controlling the spread of the pandemic.

But educating people about HIV/AIDS continues to be a delicate matter — if not downright hazardous — for voluntary agencies working to contain and control it in the states, which have total control over law and order and health.

Last month, in southern Kerala, which boasts the best public health services in India and has achieved total literacy, an NGO called People’s Association for Non-formal Education and Development in Technology (PANTECH) was accused of promoting prostitution and forced to shut shop.

PANTECH’s ‘Partnership for Sexual Health’ project, funded by the British DfID, involved a peer-education programme to disseminate information on safe sex practices among sex workers and the free distribution of condoms.

“The people behind PANTECH had turned the project into another centre for the exploitation of hapless women,” V P Janaki, a political activist was quoted as saying.

Janaki, a local leader of the powerful All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), declared that said her organisation would not allow PANTECH to reopen its project in Kerala.

In May last year, medical doctor Abhijeet Das and his wife Yashodara, founder of the well-known NGO ‘SAHYOG’ were arrested at the Himalayan town of Almora, 300 km north-east of here, for distributing a pamphlet entitled ‘AIDS and US’ which suggested that incest was prevalent in the area.

The Das couple found themselves put away in a police lock-up for more than a month under the draconian National Security Act (NSA), which prevented them from even seeking bail.