RIGHTS-INDIA: Communities Rally around HIV/AIDS Widows

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Puran Singh

BHATINDA, India, Dec 31 2002 (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.”