Inter Press Service - May 29, 2000
Ranjit Devraj

While rapping the excessive use of state power against the publishers of the booklet that set on fire the small Himalayan town of Almora, the critics blamed the blind adoption of an "alien" AIDS education approach for this.

Abhijeet Das and his wife Yashodhara, founders of 'Sahyog' a voluntary organisation that produced the pamphlet, were arrested in late April under special national security laws. The couple and several Sahyog workers narrowly escaped being lynched by an angry mob in Almora in northern Uttar Pradesh state.

They were still in jail, with even local lawyers refusing to come to their defence. The local population was incensed by references in the booklet "AIDS and Us," in Hindi, suggesting that incest was widespread in the region known as Uttarakhand.

Human rights and AIDS groups issued statements slamming the government for blatant rights abuse. But some also pointed to serious flaws in the government's National Aids Control Project (NACP) funded with a 544 million U.S. dollar World Bank loan.

Critics targeted the NACP's 'vertical' AIDS management programme and its strategy of farming out the sensitive job of awareness building in a tradition-bound society to non- governmental organisations (NGOs).

The Das couple admitted that the booklet was objectionable and apologised for its sexually explicit language and suggestions of incest. But this had not helped efforts to get them freed.

Nor did it help growing public scepticism about well-funded anti-HIV programmes at a time when the government was steadily cutting funds for an already tottering public health delivery system.

"People are beginning to wonder why AIDS seminars are being conducted in the middle of a malaria outbreak in (the northeastern border state of) Assam or during famine-like conditions in (western) Rajasthan," said leading public health expert Mira Shiva of the Voluntary Health Association of India (VHAI).

No one, Shiva said, seemed interested in tackling problems like widespread malnutrition and repeated infections which plague India's population and which are medically recognised as sources of AIDS.

While not approving of Sahyog's pamphlet, Shiva said it was "a shame that a respectable doctor and his wife were handcuffed and paraded through the streets" of Almora before being locked away under the National Security Act (NSA) which makes it very difficult for them to be freed on bail.

The treatment meted out to the Das couple drew protests from leading intellectuals who demanded, in a statement, that the government review their case immediately and revoke charges of violating national security.

But they also slammed the official AIDS control programme in the country which they said was being driven by the World Bank and Western donors.

"The present incident highlights the alienated nature of policies being adopted not only in AIDS control but also in other spheres of development whether it is health, education, forestry or water management," the statement said.

The production and distribution of the AIDS booklet in Almora reflected the "uni-dimensional perspective of the international AIDS control programme," it added. According to the statement, the Indian AIDS programme has been insensitive to prevalent socio- economic and cultural values.

"The fact that the Indian government has uncritically accepted this programme is the moot point," added the statement that was signed by leading sociologists, lawyers and media personalities among other prominent people.

This was not the first time that the liberally-funded National AIDS Control Programme, which operates under the federal Health Ministry, had come under fire for not taking into account local cultural conditions.

Last December, following complaints from leading womens' groups, the Prime Minister's office ordered a review of AIDS control strategies adopted for the just concluded 121 million- dollar first phase of the programme.

According to Ranjana Kumari, convenor of the Joint-Action Front for Women, national AIDS programme strategies "violate the dignity of women and legitimise the commodification of women." She was referring to a programme under which condoms were distributed to sex-workers.

In presentations to the Prime Minister's Office then, a leading human rights organisation showed how AIDS control strategies were based on unreliable data and studies that used questionable methodology.

Auditi Mehta, a senior bureaucrat in the Prime Minister's Office had then said: "There appears to be an attempt to create an AIDS scare."

According to Shiva, who knows Uttarakhand well, the present controversy was unfortunate because it could scare away voluntary work in a region where public health delivery is almost non- existent.

"Few doctors want to work in Uttarakhand because of the poverty and hardship in the region," she said, adding that women in the region suffer the most. They do not even have the services of a gynaecologist and are victims of social taboos which result in their being forced to live in cattle sheds while menstruating.

"There is a real need in Uttarakhand for sensitively handled sexual awareness campaigns because while taboos exist, mothers refuse to discuss subjects like menstruation with their daughters," Shiva said. (END/IPS/ap-hd-he/rdr/mu/00)
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