THE SOUL OF THE BUSINESS
A PRIVATE   FAITH MADE DANGEROUSLY PUBLIC 
The Making of a Paper
 By SHOMA CHAUDHURY
 In Gratitude
 By TARUN J TEJPAL

Photos: Sanjeev Valsan

Many HIV-positive sex workers who are aware of their status, will not divulge it to clients or change their high-risk behaviour for the fear of losing their livelihood

The evening before this interview, Zila Khan, 19, performed a nude mujra in Lucknow before being auctioned for Rs 10,000 to a member of the audience to serve him for the remainder of the night. Khan, a sex worker, normally solicits her customers on Linking Road in Mumbai’s stylish Bandra suburb and says she was tested for HIV last year. Like an estimated 70 percent of sex workers in India, she doesn’t insist on a condom and, since both her tests returned negative, no longer nags her clients to roll on the innocuous stretch of latex that may save her life. The illegal status of sex-work contributes to its clandestine nature, preventing the collation of reliable figures. According to a 2003 report by the World Bank however, 1.1 percent of adult Indian women could be engaged in sex work. With this figure and on the basis of its own studies, the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) estimates that in 2003, 70,794 of India’s sex workers were infected with HIV/AIDS. This is a conservative estimate. Incessant police raids ensure that the majority of sex workers — who are non-brothel based or “floating” — remain underground. They are unwilling to come forward to access treatment for sexually transmitted infections, receive condoms, and learn client-negotiating skills from community counsellors affiliated with NGOs. This attitude may remain unchanged even after the contraction of HIV. Many who are aware of their status, will not divulge it to clients or change their high-risk behaviour for the fear of losing their livelihood.

 India’s sex workers therefore are strong only in number. Among the communities on the fringes of mainstream society which are struggling for a foothold, sex workers — whether they are female, male or hijra (eunuch) — are the most vulnerable. They arouse scant sympathy, and their trafficking, poverty, ill health, unlawful arrest, physical abuse and stigmatisation are dismissed as hazards of the job of providing a service which is illegal and taboo. An activist with an aid agency in Mumbai recounts the trauma of a sex worker who, when she was discovered as being HIV-positive by her lover, was beaten, dragged to the field near the slum where they lived, doused with kerosene and burnt. She barely survived and when the activist returned to the slum to garner support for her, he was received with a silence that suggested his tale was neither novel nor deserving of consideration. In the red light district of Kamathipura which at dusk exemplifies Bombay noir, where sex, poverty, violence and crime bleed into life and onto the streets — the hijra sex-worker Neelam concludes that “prostitutes have nothing. We might as well be dead.” She is 21 years old. Neelam’s mother died of AIDS when she was 14, and although she practices safe sex now, she didn’t in the decade before she became a hijra when she would nightly solicit men in cinema halls. Neelam has been tested four times for HIV but not once did she return for the results. She believes given her fragile life, sometimes “it’s better not to know the truth.”

Since the creation of NACO — the first government organisation to formulate policy for HIV/AIDS awareness — in 1992, and the involvement of international agencies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which pledged US$ 258 million to tackle AIDS in India in 2003, the Indian response to the disease has evolved, and now prominently involves sex workers who take responsibility as peer educators. Consequently, instead of having to deal with “outsiders”, of whom they are understandably wary, sex workers are approached by members of their own community.

Organisations successfully using this form of intervention include Sampada Grameen Mahila Sanstha (sangram), an HIV/AIDS support organisation created by Meena Saraswathi Seshu, who won the 2002 Human Rights Watch Award. sangram has 100 peer educators who distribute three lakh condoms per week in seven districts in Maharashtra. Sashikant Mane, who works with sangram, says, “Most sex workers are illiterate and don’t understand they are being stigmatised or denied rights available to others. For example, a sex worker may not even know that a goonda who enters her house to rape her wouldn’t do the same in the house of a non-sex worker. But to get to the point where you can discuss these matters, you need to win trust, promise confidentiality and offer tangible support. No one does this better than one sex worker to another.” In Kolkata, Durbar Mahila Samanway Committee (DMSC) has registered 60,000 sex workers. Bharati Dey, the programme director is a former sex worker herself. DMSC, whose Sonagachi Project has been described as a “Best Practices” model by the unAIDS programme, was the first Indian organisation to realise that the participation of sex workers was essential for the success of any programme to combat HIV/AIDS. Sex workers, many of whom choose to continue in the profession even after becoming active members of the project, fan out in the brothels in the red light district of Sonagachi, distributing condoms to 10,000 women according to their “transaction frequency”. (A sex worker who says she entertains four clients a week, for example, will be given five-six condoms, but no more, to prevent misuse.) Says DMSC worker Sapna Gayen, “The DMSC was always going to hand over leadership to us sex workers. Unless we’re in control, making a change will never be as necessary or symbolic.”

Control is a rare commodity in the life of a sex worker; hence the allure of organisations like sangram and DMSC. The majority of sex workers don’t enter the profession voluntarily, although after years they may believe that it’s safer to stay within the community, and — given their history and handicaps such as illiteracy – that it’s also their only option. This loss of control starts early, when a girl, usually between the ages of 8-16, is trafficked into sex work from states like Bengal and Bihar, to Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Communities like the Bedia train their girl children for sex work and dancing and their virginity is auctioned off for as much as Rs 1 lakh. Older women, who enter the profession voluntarily, often with the help of an agent, do so due to desertion by their husbands, or widowhood and poverty.

An investigating officer with Mumbai’s Rescue Foundation, says the cycle of trafficking ensures the enslavement of women. “During the first weeks of her arrival, the girl is beaten, raped, and mocked that she can never escape. In time, she submits, is happy with the money she receives and forgets all thoughts of returning home. When she’s old enough, there’s only one job she can do. So she returns to her hometown, impresses the young girls with stories of Mumbai’s prosperity and beguiles them into running away. They are thus trafficked into the brothel she has set up for herself.” Trafficked women are even more vulnerable to HIV than voluntary sex workers. The annual funnelling of thousands of women into brothels is carried out by a powerful criminal network that ensures that trafficked girls have little contact outside of the brothel. This naturally stymies access to condoms, health check-ups and even knowledge of the daily health risks they experience, ultimately impacting their own and the lives of others. A girl who has contracted the virus but appears healthy will continue practicing sex work. Purchased for upwards of Rs 25,000 by the brothel owner, she has a “debt” to repay. This may take up to 15 years, depending on the brothel owner’s whim, but until he’s paid, she won’t be released. Asked if sangram asks HIV/AIDS infected sex workers to stop practicing sex work, Sashikant Mane says that to do so would be a violation of their freedom of choice. “We ask them to use condoms,” he says. Those who continue to practice sex work without using condoms will of course transmit the infection to some of their clients, who then transmit it onwards to their own partners, including their wives, counter-intuitively making married women one of India’s highest HIV risk groups.

Asked how often she has sex without a condom, Lucky replies, ‘When I have a choice, never. When someone holds a knife at my throat, every time.’

Yet, to blame a sex worker for not using a condom is like blaming a trafficked girl for performing sex work. It presumes that these girls possess the power of choice. Lucky, 24, who solicits in a park in Mumbai’s Vashi suburb, was hit with a rock by a customer enraged that she dared request he wear a condom. He forced her to have unprotected sex even as she bled profusely, leaving her incapacitated. She required 12 stitches and has refused to take an HIV test since. She says the neighbourhood police are her biggest threat. Policemen in groups of two or more drag a sex worker into their patrol car or behind bushes and rape her through the night. “‘Hame bina condom ka sex chahiye!’ (We want to have sex without a condom!) they demand,” says Lucky. Girls who refuse are thrashed and then raped without a condom. “Tapori log” (Goondas) are the other threat. In groups as large as 15, these young men brandish sticks and knives, attack sex workers at knifepoint and rape them. Asked how often she has sex without a condom, Lucky replies, “When I have a choice, never. When someone holds a knife at my throat, every time.”

In Mumbai, Prabha Desai, chairman of the Sanmitra Trust, counsels a Bengali sex worker, no more than 25, who has contracted HIV and been deserted by her brother, the only family member she has. Desai will accompany her to the city’s Jyoti Terminal Care Centre for AIDS, where she will remain, receiving antiretroviral therapy. Desai recalls that several years ago HIV/AIDS infected sex workers wouldn’t admit their status until incapacitated, sometimes dying just a day after being rescued. “Sex workers are the most vulnerable social community,” admits Desai. “For, while awareness has improved the situation among the general public, it’s meaningless to a sex worker who has no bargaining power to turn down a client refusing to wear a condom. Sex work is also stigmatised, and HIV/AIDS has added fuel to the fire. Don’t legalise sex work, but don’t illegalise it either. It’s a legitimate profession, but as long as stigma exists, and police raid and harass sex workers, they will be constantly uprooted, vulnerable, in denial, and neglectful of their health, unwilling even to show their face in the queue at a government hospital.”

Even among the marginalised and the brutalised, there are some who are more so than others. So it is with the sex workers of India. If their life already resembles what most of us would consider a horrible dream, their inability to protect themselves from HIV during the course of earning their livelihood has certainly brought them closer to both living and dying that nightmare.

Names of all the sex workers have been changed