Modeled on US state antiprostitution laws, the amendments would criminalize paying for sexual services even if the woman insisted she was selling sex voluntarily. Anyone found to even be visiting a brothel faced up to six months in jail and a fine equivalent to roughly $1,000, a vast fortune for most Indians. (In the US states with the harshest antiprostitution laws, clients can be jailed for up to five years for repeat convictions and fined up to $150,000.)
And, as in the US, all kinds of retrograde provisions were being introduced to inflict blatantly cruel punishments on the sex workers. One astonishing clause would increase the length of time—to an astounding seven years—that a sex worker could be imprisoned in corrective institutions. (I was astounded that the minister advocating for these changes was a woman—the long-standing politician Renuka Chowdhury, now holding the Ministry of Women & Child Development portfolio—and yet could be party to such cruel treatment of other women.) Another would sanction raids to forcibly remove and incarcerate even adult sex workers who expressly stated that they were selling sex entirely of their own accord; in the past, only minors or adults who declared that they were victims of abuse or trafficking could be legally removed through raids and given shelter by government institutions. Those provisions made a mockery of women’s rights to self-determination. “This is typical of the patriarchal Indian state, which believes that women never achieve adulthood,” Bharati Dey, the Durbar’s secretary, commented. The intent was clearly to force sex workers out of their work by punishing them harshly.
Emboldened by the Indian government’s compliance, the Bush administration turned to targeting the pathbreaking sex workers’ collectives. Those groups posed the most potent counterevidence to the Bush assertion that prostitution was synonymous with sex trafficking and sex slavery. They were also powerful critics of the administration’s views, returning or forgoing US government grants rather than signing the prostitution gag rule, and joining prominent human rights and AIDS groups around the world in releasing an open letter that criticized the Bush administration for its cynical conflation of sex work with sex trafficking. (Embarrassingly for the Bush administration, after a widely reported dispute, Brazil’s government had recently refused nearly $50 million in US grants because the prostitution gag rule amounted to “interference that harms the Brazilian policy regarding diversity, ethical principles and human rights.”)
Audaciously, the Bush administration set about accusing those groups of being complicit in child prostitution and trafficking of women. The sex workers’ collective VAMP and its parent organization, Sangram, became its first targets.
Late on the afternoon of May 20, 2005, Gokul Nagar, a shantytown of narrow rustic houses on the outskirts of Sangli in southern Maharashtra, was raided by a contingent of nearly a hundred Indian policemen and policewomen. Bizarrely, leading the police action was a white American man—later identified as Greg Malstead, an American with a hard-line Christian organization, Restore International, bent on “rescuing” women from prostitution. Hearing of it, I thought angrily that if I had tried such Indiana Jones–esque shenanigans in the United States—perhaps rescuing some of the countless African American men unjustly jailed in brutal conditions—I would have ended up shot or locked away in prison. The police kicked in doors, abused the women, and thrashed several of them. Nearly fifty women were then locked up in Sangli’s reformatory—most of them on the grounds that they were minors and had been trafficked into sex work, others accused of being brothel managers abetting trafficking.
There was an outpouring of support for Sangram/VAMP (as the group is commonly known) from many quarters. Many raised the obvious question why the area where Sangram/VAMP had worked painstakingly for years to fight sex trafficking—bringing it down to a fraction of past levels—had been targeted rather than crime-beset Mumbai, just three hundred miles away, where trafficking remained intractable and unaddressed. Eventually, a prolonged judicial investigation concluded that not one of the women had been trafficked and none of the brothel managers was involved in trafficking.
A second, equally violent and abortive raid on the collective’s sex workers followed that summer. But the breathtaking culmination was that at the end of September the Bush administration accused Meena Seshu—the feminist and social worker who had founded Sangram in 1992—of trafficking children and women into prostitution and opposing their rescue from brothels.
“US Accuses NGO of Trafficking,” blared a Hindustan Times headline. The report quoted US ambassador John R. Miller, the conservative former congressman appointed by Bush to lead the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, as saying “I want to believe this is an exception, an anomaly. But we are reviewing other programmes and if there is any specific information that an organization is trying to keep people from being rescued from any kind of trafficking, we will be looking into it. . . . If the US is going to play a leadership role in abolishing this modern-day slavery in the 21st century, then we need to ensure that US funds go to support that effort and not frustrate it.”
It was a surreal charge. Seshu, whom I knew well, was a member of UNAIDS’s Reference Group on HIV and Human Rights. Sangram/VAMP’s work had long been praised by UN agencies as well as USAID. Seshu and her husband, Vasant, a prominent newspaper editor who belonged to the area, had adopted several children of sex workers.
The very next day after Seshu had been accused of being a “trafficker” by the US government, I found myself seated next to Mark Dybul, the second-ranking official in the Office of the US Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy, at the opening session of a small strategy retreat hosted by UNAIDS. I couldn’t restrain myself from telling Dybul how disappointed I was by the US government’s actions against Seshu and Sangram/VAMP, that this was a historic low point in the United States’ AIDS-related efforts in India.
Dybul looked astonished, no doubt taken aback that anyone from UNAIDS would speak so critically to a top official from a leading donor government. He recovered and replied, caustically, that the Indian government had confirmed Sangram’s involvement in child trafficking. I retorted that all of us working on AIDS knew well that governments rarely if ever stood up for sex workers and other reviled citizens and so my government’s views were hardly likely to be accurate. (As it was, breaking ranks with the Bush administration because of criticism within India, the Indian government insisted a few days later that the US embassy in Delhi publicly retract its charges against Seshu and Sangram.)
My disappointment with Dybul was the sharper for seeing that in spite of having himself faced the difficulties of being openly gay, he was so lacking in empathy for sex workers and so willing to be complicit with a bigoted president who had long attacked gays and other underdogs in his own country and was now doing so abroad. Not so long ago, being gay had been no less damning to a public career in the US than being a sex worker.
Dybul was soon promoted to the post of US global AIDS coordinator and became ever more clearly an apologist for the Bush administration’s brutalizing policies, calling them a “compassionate response” to prostitution. That was one of my first moments of realization that there was little certainty that the gay men and women now taking seats at the tables of power would have notable empathy for other disadvantaged people. As some thoughtful feminists had already noted about women in power, most such people were likely to readily participate in oppressing and exploiting others.
Apart from the confrontation with Dybul, that meeting served only to reveal to me yet another depressing cause of Piot’s decline: he had developed the Lords of Poverty syndrome, the chronic addiction of many in the international development set to enjoying high luxury at public expense. The venue of the two-day meeting was the grand palace-hotel of Le Mirador Kempinski at the Swiss resort town of Mont Pèlerin. UNAIDS was hosting dozens at that châteaulike building with its unrivaled views of Lake Geneva and paying for sumptuous Michelin-starred feasts at baronial dining tables. The bills for the pointless talkfest—which Pi
ot had touted as an “envisioning exercise” for the long-term response to AIDS—would have covered a small country’s annual supply of anti-AIDS drugs. The excess was on a par with the worst that I had seen at the World Bank. To see it coming from the UNAIDS Secretariat, a place that not long ago I had thought was run like a barebones nongovernmental organization, was devastating. I was relieved that I had been assigned to a cheap place nearby, rather than being implicated unknowingly in that shameless waste.
It was obvious to me that a decade of being a top UN official handling the era’s global cause célèbre—Piot was now in an unbroken third term as the secretariat’s boss, thanks to a loophole in administrative rules, had left him divorced from reality. Endless hobnobbing with billionaires, royalty, and celebrities may have led Piot to forget the hoi polloi whose survival he was supposed to be fighting for, the tens of millions struggling to survive despite their HIV infections as well as the many millions of marginalized people at risk of contracting HIV. And the top-level misgovernance that is the bane of the UN system, a key reason why it is perennially a shadow of its laudable ideals, meant that he was never held to account.
Piot should have either lived up to his responsibilities or, if he felt he no longer had the dedication to combat the Bush administration, handed the job to someone who could do it justice. Instead, he frittered his formidable energy on vanity projects akin to the Mont Pèlerin meeting that contributed nothing to fulfilling the secretariat’s core responsibilities.
There was endless money to burn, with the secretariat’s biennial budget now touching $200 million. Half a million or one million dollars, or even vastly more, was wasted on worthless reports and initiatives. There was AIDS in Africa: Three Scenarios to 2025, a coffee-table tome on the future of the continent’s epidemic, told through folksy illustrated stories, as if Africans could not grasp anything more complex. There was a 250-page chronicle on the first decade of UNAIDS’s work, which itself took three years to be written and published. There was aids2031, touted as planning the long-term response to the pandemic, looking ahead to the fiftieth year after the disease’s first medical reports in 1981. All those fed the gravy train for highly paid staff and consultants in the multibillion-dollar AIDS industry; neither any money nor any good trickled down to the people who needed to be helped. And all the while, the quality of the secretariat’s essential policy and technical reports plummeted—the 2006 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, marking twenty-five years of the pandemic, embarrassingly needed an entire page of corrigenda.
When the UNAIDS Secretariat moved at the end of 2006 from its nondescript offices to the latest addition to the United Nations’ gleaming modern buildings in Geneva, boasting sky-high atriums and acres of tinted glass, Piot told the assembled staff that we should be proud to have the nicest building and the best art collection of the city’s international organizations. Quite a few of my colleagues seemed as baffled as I was to hear that, no doubt wondering where the once committed scientist had disappeared to. The glacial new building symbolized how much the secretariat had changed in recent years under Piot; like countless other UN organizations, it had become a self-serving bureaucracy for fat cats.
TWENTY
UNIVERSAL RIGHTS AND SCANDALOUS WRONGS
Over the Christmas break of 2005, Arndt and I joined my father for a brief holiday in Goa. I then went to Baba ka Gaon to visit Ram Dass, Prayaga Devi, and the people I considered my family in that village. On the return leg of that journey, I stayed overnight in Lucknow with Saleem Kidwai, a close friend from the 1980s, when we had both been drawn together in Delhi’s tightly knit gay community of that time. Saleem, a historian of medieval India, and another friend, Ruth Vanita, a noted feminist scholar, were the coeditors of Same-Sex Love in India, published in 2000, a meticulously researched work that brought together extracts from literature about same-sex love in the subcontinent from ancient times to the current.
Our conversation returned time and again to the frustration we both felt over the lack of headway made by a second legal suit challenging Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. The case had been filed in December 2001 in the Delhi High Court. The first challenge, filed in 1994 by ABVA, the activist group in which my friend Siddhartha had been a driving force, had petered out, a victim of the deadening pace of India’s appallingly underresourced judicial system. We had all hoped that that second challenge would make faster headway than the 1994 case. The two civil society groups driving the challenge—the Naz Foundation (India) Trust, one of the country’s first groups to begin HIV prevention efforts for gay men and transgender individuals, and the Lawyers Collective, which undertook public interest litigation—had better resources than the ABVA collective and were better placed to deal with the judiciary’s institutionalized weaknesses.
But the case had been obstructed not only by the judiciary’s slow pace but also by what seemed to be the reluctance of the judges to grapple with the matter. Then, in December 2004, when the petition belatedly came up for hearing, the court dismissed Naz India’s case on the questionable grounds that its chief executive and listed appellant, Anjali Gopalan, was not gay, had not been personally harmed by Section 377, and therefore had no legal standing to file a public interest challenge. (Indian courts had long established that public interest litigation could be moved by anyone, and the involvement of an affected individual or community—an aggrieved “test case,” as in Roe v. Wade or Lawrence v. Texas in the United States—was not necessary.) It had taken another year before the efforts of Anand Grover, the human rights lawyer who had played a unique role in challenging HIV-related discrimination since representing Dominic D’Souza in 1989, made the Supreme Court instruct the Delhi court to hear the case promptly, saying it had erred in dismissing it. Yet another year had passed without action by the Delhi court. It now seemed that that case would also die from attrition.
Somehow, in a whirl of animated conversation, by the time I left Lucknow the following day, Saleem and I had chalked out a detailed plan for getting the most thoughtful and highly respected Indians to make a collective public statement in favor of striking down Section 377. As a model we had in mind the 1897 petition signed by prominent Germans—including Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Magnus Hirschfeld, Thomas Mann, and Rainer Maria Rilke—asking the government to overturn Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that criminalized homosexuality. We hoped we might push the courts to stop ignoring the matter, as well as influence public opinion and possibly even the government’s stand.
Everything fell into place rapidly. Anjali Gopalan and Anand Grover agreed that that would help summon the court’s attention. Within minutes of my emailing him, Vikram Seth, my senior at Doon School and now a close friend, wrote back to say that he would be willing to lead the campaign.
Addressed to the government, the judiciary, and India’s citizens, our open letter, drafted by Vikram, Saleem, and me, began by stating “To build a truly democratic and plural India, we must collectively fight against laws and policies that abuse human rights and limit fundamental freedoms. This is why we, concerned Indian citizens and people of Indian origin, support the overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law dating to 1861, which punitively criminalizes romantic love and private, consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex.
“In independent India, as earlier, this archaic and brutal law has served no good purpose. It has been used to systematically persecute, blackmail, arrest and terrorize sexual minorities. It has spawned public intolerance and abuse, forcing tens of millions of gay and bisexual men and women to live in fear and secrecy, at tragic cost to themselves and their families.”
Vikram, with his poet’s unerring eye, added at the letter’s end, “In the name of humanity and our Constitution, this cruel and discriminatory law should be struck down.”
We sent the letter off to canvass signatures—and every day our hearts swelled with joy to see how many thoughtful, eminent Indians were writing ba
ck to say that they would add their signatures to it. Soon the lead signatories included legendary freedom fighters, progressive Hindu leaders, retired top UN officials, even a former attorney general of India. It spoke volumes about our cause being a matter of fundamental human rights that all the lead signatories, apart from Vikram and me, were straight.
More than 150 eminent Indians signed the open letter. Not only were many great thinkers, journalists, filmmakers, artists, and writers on the list, but also some of the country’s most respected leaders in business, education, the civil service, and the armed forces, demonstrating the strength of support even in traditionally conservative quarters of the establishment. All of India’s secular, democratic, forward-thinking promise was represented in what had become a citizens’ movement.
In August, a month before the campaign was to be launched, Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, said he would join us but would write a complementary letter as he wanted to convey points that he felt strongly about. That was a godsend: Sen is lionized in India, with a broad appeal in virtually every section of society. I had never forgotten the compassion with which Sen had responded when, as a young Harvard graduate student, I had told him I was gay. No doubt realizing that it had taken all my courage to be open with him, he told me at length about the fear his gay friends in England had lived in during their college years in the 1950s and then, in an quintessentially Indian act of reassurance, had put his arm around my shoulders as we had left the faculty dining room.
His concluding paragraph took away my breath when I first read it. Sen wrote, “It is surprising that independent India has not yet been able to rescind the colonial era monstrosity in the shape of Section 377, dating from 1861. That, as it happens, was the year in which the American Civil War began, which would ultimately abolish the unfreedom of slavery in America. Today, 145 years later, we surely have urgent reason to abolish in India, with our commitment to democracy and human rights, the unfreedom of arbitrary and unjust criminalization.”
An Indefinite Sentence Page 28
