Tackling the scourge

Even though the exact number of the HIV/AIDS-infected in India is at best a guesstimation, the pandemic is for real — all the government has to do is face up to it

Sanjay Kapoor Delhi

Sushma Swaraj, health minister in the erstwhile Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition, is a feisty woman. With her typical bridal Banarasi saris and sindoor (vermillion) liberally spread in the parting of her hair, she has striven to project herself as a virtuous Indian woman (Bharatiya nari) who considers it a blasphemy to even talk in public about sex. Her carefully-cultivated image was "propah" from every which way you looked at it. She was seen as a pious Hindu counterpoint to everything that was sinful, promiscuous, and smacked of a Western mindset. Through her conservative but elaborate attire, she wanted to show her superiority to those (in her context, read Congress president Sonia Gandhi) who bucked the Hindu way of life.

Expectedly, in her capacity as health minister, Swaraj more or less bunged the megatonnage of her religious fundamentalism on the nation's health policy, such as it is. Her prudery upset earlier well-established health policy initiatives, one of which was the country's condom programme designed to prevent the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) and the more politically-sensitive pandemic of HIV/AIDS. Swaraj nursed the notion that spreading condom awareness wasn't the right way to tackle the rampaging virus; abstinence and monogamy were, in her reckoning, an infinitely better option — actually, the only option. She also felt that an AIDS awareness programme that used visually-suggestive latex prophylactics as a preventive measure would only promote promiscuity amongst youngsters.

Former health secretary J V R Prasada Rao, who silently watched over a religious ideology bending the nation's health policy to its will, agreed in an interview to Hardnews ('HIV/AIDS figures can never be accurate', December 2004) that the AIDS control programme suffered immensely because the lowly, low-tech condom is still the best and least expensive way to control the spread of AIDS. Rao retired from his department a relieved man, after it shed the obscurantist idiosyncrasies of a religious ideology once the United Progressive Alliance government took over in June this year.

The other stumbling block was a section within the BJP-led government that was, in addition to being retrograde, fiercely xenophobic. AIDS was an issue that gave maximum play to their fears. Swaraj's predecessor, former filmstar Shatrughan "Shotgun" Sinha, had seen in the AIDS pandemic the spoor of an international conspiracy. Till he was forced to change his tune, he saw everywhere the hand of a vested interest bent upon creating a socio-medical scare.

Sinha told Hardnews, "These NGOs were creating panic in the country on the basis of a CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] report, while there was another report which contradicted the CIA report findings. I know that AIDS is a money-making racket and there was nothing that the government could do about it." Sinha had even refused to entertain Bill and Melinda Gates when they came to India. He later did a volte face, saying, "What's the harm if we expect their grants and utilise them until our health services are well-equipped?"

Such needless confusion about the health ministry's mandate has caused not a little problem for India's AIDS programme. People in India living with HIV/AIDS increased from 3.97 million in 2001 and 4.58 million in 2002 to 5.1 million in 2004. While the epidemic first started to spread in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Manipur, no single state can be considered entirely unaffected today. (Report compiled by the Population Foundation of India and the Population Reference Bureau)