A nation in denial

A nation in denial
Siddharth Dube

The official view is that we are a uniquely moral society, literally that Indians don't have sex. Virtually every Indian political leader, bureaucrat and opinion-maker whom I have interviewed or talked to about HIV/AIDS has asserted this as an unquestionable truth. They argue in all earnestness that Indian society is more moral than others, that the average Indian does not have sex before or outside marriage, and that this will protect India from ever suffering from an epidemic of HIV/AIDS. The denial would be funny were it not so dangerous.

Thus, even in 1991 when their own estimates showed that about five lakh Indians were infected with HIV, India's top health decision-makers continued to insist that we had higher moral values than Africans or Westerners, and consequently that an HIV epidemic could never develop here. The then Union health secretary R.L. Misra told me that ``considering our social and cultural values and traditions, I feel quite confident that AIDS will not spread as far and fast as in Africa.'' At the Indian Council of Medical Research, Director-General Dr A.S. Paintal added, ``Nowhere else in the world is chastity considered an important aspect of a woman's life apart from India.'' Dr A.N. Malviya of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, asserted that Africans were promiscuous but Indians were ``of a higher moral order.''

Their belief continues unshaken. Hence, in 1996 an MP from Bihar asserted in Parliament that ``AIDS could never dare show its face in the land of the Buddha.''....

But these leaders and the many others who think like them are absolutely wrong. Travel across India with your eyes and mind wide open to its realities and you will see that there is sex happening everywhere, across its length and breadth, from the Kutch to Kohima, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Husbands and wives, unmarried lovers, teenaged boyfriends and girlfriends: they are all copulating. Sex workers whether female or male or hijra, child, adolescent or adult are desperately hawking their sexual wares.

There's homosexuality aplenty: men are having sex with men, women with women. Girls and women, and often boys and sometimes men, are being raped. Infants and children are being sexually abused. Indians are having sex in rural fields and huts, on the pavements in towns and cities, in tenements and slums, in low-income housing complexes, in plush bedrooms, in corporate boardrooms, in offices, in mantralays and ministries, in the bungalows uninhabited by the country's most powerful politicians. Hindi-speaking, Urdu-speaking, Gujarati, Tamil, Punjabi, Malayalam ... Anyhow, even if it were true that most Indians were more ``moral'' than other nationalities, having just one or a few sexual partners over their lifetime, it would not automatically follow that India would be spared a severe HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Just how severely a country will be hit by HIV/AIDS depends not just on the sexual behaviour of its people but on whether they are vulnerable to contracting sexually-transmitted diseases when they do indeed have sex. The distinction is straight-forward. Are people empowered to have safe sex by learning about HIV/AIDS, using condoms, having their STDs treated, forgoing or being able to refuse high-risk sex? Or are they so disadvantaged, for whatever mix of reasons, that they continue to have unsafe sex that puts them at risk of contracting HIV? It is because the vast majority of people in rich ``industrialised'' countries, from Canada to Japan to Australia, are able to learn about HIV/AIDS and then to act on their knowledge that these countries have, so far at least, prevented widespread epidemics of HIV/AIDS...

Excerpts from `Sex Lies and AIDS' by Siddharth Dube, HarperCollins Publishers India, Rs 295