Bigots take the temple: moralizers are encouraging HIV infection

• Published in: New internationalist no. 250; pp. 24 - 5
• Main Authors: Kavi, Ashok Row, Godrej, Dinyar
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford New Internationalist 01.12.1993; New Internationalist Co-operative
• Subjects: Acquired immune deficiency syndrome; AIDS; AIDS (Disease); India
• ISSN: 0305-9529

In 1990, some 854 women from Bombay's redlight district were rounded up and sent to Madras. They were put in jail, then shunted around the city to clinics. Over 400 tested HIV positive. When some were placed in hospital they were shunned by doctors and other patients fled. Some were held in a 'vigilance home'. The state minister for social welfare said that women whose families would take them back could leave once they knew what being HIV positive meant. But as one woman said, 'After publicly announcing we have been at the vigilance home, known as a place where only prostitutes are held, which family will risk the dishonour of taking us back?' Blaming the women and throwing them out of Bombay only reduced the chances of their getting counselling on how to minimize the risk to others and cope with HIV. Infectious diseases are routine and feared. Dredged from the depths of colonial slime comes the 1929 Infectious Diseases Act of Maharashtra, amended to require that all HIV positive people are registered with local health authorities. This even though HIV cannot be transmitted through air, water or the casual contact that the Act was designed to control. Often even doctors imagine that HIV is contagious and won't touch patients or let them sit on their chairs. A lethal plague mentality develops, based on ignorance and confusion. The Maharashtra government even considered making being HIV positive a 'cognizable offence', allowing detention without a warrant. Aids prejudice rides on the backs of many others like the Indian concept of Mardaani. Mardaani says that low sexual control is a characteristic of men and it is women who are to blame for 'tempting' the man to fall from purity. This idea opens the door to misogyny and women become vulnerable to blame for new stigmas like spreading HIV when in reality it's much more difficult for a man to get HIV from sex with a woman than vice - versa.