My father said he wanted to see the waterfall across the valley while lying in bed. His voice ringing with excitement. Indeed, he wanted to see it even from his bathroom. Would that be possible? He wanted a skylight above his bed so that he could gaze up at the stars and the moon. He wanted a terrace outside his bedroom—just in case he felt like wandering outside at night. Whatever he wanted, I happily agreed to (sans the open bathroom). The home was going to be my gift to him—a small, inadequate thanks for all the love that he’d given me.
I bought the land all the way from the plateau stretching down to the panchayat road, because eventually we would have to construct our own road up to the house. (For the moment, the management of the neighboring tea estate—which owned the rocky road abutting the property—generously allowed us to use theirs.) I found an architect and a contractor willing to construct the house at record speed despite the difficult site. They began to build a home that matched my father’s wishes, the expanses of glass outweighing the concrete. The forest authorities helped us design a formidable fence that would keep out the leopards, which have a particular fondness for eating dogs. We had Lorca and my father’s mammoth German shepherd, Sher Khan, to protect, as well as Puppy, a stray waif my father had adopted after Sher Khan had found her, lost in the tea bushes, miraculously alive in spite of the leopards.
A few days after the purchase was finalized, my father and I went for a walk around the higher of the two mountains. At its very top, from which there was a breathtaking 360-degree view stretching to the horizon on every side, I spotted a small painted sign with the mountain’s name in both Tamil and English—Pana Para Mattam, “the sacred place of treasure” in Tamil. We had seen the sign many times together. On that day my heart leaped, as I spotted in the name an anagram of “Papa” and “Rana,” my nickname.
A sacred, treasured place for Papa and Rana! I excitedly pointed out the coincidence to my father. He looked at the sign, wordless, and then turned to me with a smile of delight and enveloped me in the most loving hug. We stood there together on that wild mountaintop, father and son, our hearts filled with wonder.
TWENTY-TWO
THE MOST DANGEROUS OF TIMES
From 2007 through 2009, I traveled widely across India and Southeast Asia. Everywhere I went, in all the many places where US aid and might wielded outsize clout, the scale of the harm done to sex workers by the Bush antiprostitution campaign mounted each year. There was the imposition of ever-harsher laws, intensifying persecution of sex workers, and disastrous cuts in HIV prevention funding for any groups that stood up for sex workers. The progress that had seemed imminent in India and elsewhere just a few years earlier had instead turned into terrible reversal.
In Cambodia, I witnessed firsthand the unleashed storm of abuse. At the beginning of 2008, to avoid losing direly needed US foreign aid and World Bank loans, the Cambodian government issued a draconian law—the Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation—that toed the line of the United States’ diktats conflating sex work with sex trafficking of women and children. The Bush administration commended Cambodia for the new law and promptly moved it off its list of countries that were at risk of US-imposed sanctions.
But within Cambodia, the new antiprostitution law unleashed a campaign of arrests against sex workers by the police. It was very different from the random periodic sweeps of the past. The police had been given untrammeled power because the new law criminalized soliciting, which had not been an offense until then. A large but unknown number of female and transgender sex workers were imprisoned in jails and so-called rehabilitation centers—and even by the time of my documentation visit in April 2008, several months after the raids had begun, the whereabouts of hundreds remained unknown, domestic human rights groups, such as the Women’s Network for Unity, told me.
The fear was palpable in the sex workers I met. It was a strange contrast to the indolent French colonial atmosphere of Phnom Penh, with its colonnaded houses, the promenades along the slow-moving Mekong, and the elegantly attired Cambodians and expatriates. Not one sex worker was willing to be quoted or even to meet anywhere that could put her at risk of being spotted with me, an outsider with a notepad. (That brought home to me afresh how different India was from many other developing countries—in India, barring the most extreme conditions, even marginalized, powerless people typically felt emboldened to speak openly, certain that there would be some kind of attenuating support from the media, civil society, or decent officials.)
I interviewed sex workers in crowded cafés, pretending that we were friends meeting. I kept to my promise of not taking written notes or taping the conversations. The women I met had sold sex off the street or from porn video shacks and small brothels located in the poorer parts of Phnom Penh. It was clear from what they told me that even more than in India, sex work was one of the few options to earn money open to impoverished women in Cambodia. The small, agrarian country had been ravaged by French colonialism and American political meddling, years of covert US carpet bombing during the Vietnam War, and then the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. It was poorer even than Myanmar now. Fewer than one in three girls even began secondary school. The hundreds of thousands of young men and women fleeing desperate rural conditions competed for a handful of low-paid jobs in tourism and sweatshop garment manufacturing. Sex work typically paid twice as much as what women could earn in the sweatshop factories, so it was little surprise that it seemed an attractive economic option.
The women told me that ever since the police crackdown had begun some months before, they had been subjected to extortion, beatings, and rape by policemen. Until then, the police had never acted in such a concerted, harsh fashion. Most had stopped working because the police now demanded bribes of fifty or more US dollars, ten times more than what they had extorted before the enactment of the antiprostitution law. Their children and parents were destitute, they told me, as they depended on the women’s daily earnings to eat and live.
Two of the women I interviewed had been held against their will for several months in a rehabilitation center, prevented from contacting their relatives despite having IDs proving that they were in their thirties. Even frantic pleas to be allowed to phone their children had been denied. Each had friends who were still missing—they had no idea where they were and were too scared to look for them.
Later I hired a local motorcyclist to drive me through the neighborhoods where they had worked earlier—whole stretches of eerily empty bamboo huts that had once housed low-price karaoke bars and brothels but were now sealed off. The only living creatures in sight were stray dogs and cats.
Just as astounding as the all-pervading sense of fear was the conspiracy of denial. Barring sex workers, human rights groups, and a few journalists, everyone else in Phnom Penh acted as if not one sex worker had been beaten, raped, or made to disappear in recent months. Human rights abuses were so commonplace in Cambodia and so intertwined with the corrupting overreliance on the charity of foreign governments that the United Nations habitually looked the other way. UNAIDS’s Cambodia office, despite being the first place that Cambodian and international sex workers’ rights groups had turned to for support, joined in the public silence, as did its Bangkok regional headquarters.
As it happened, at the time of my research in Cambodia, UNAIDS’s governing board was meeting in Chiang Mai, in neighboring Thailand. Would Peter Piot criticize the horrific abuses being inflicted on Cambodia’s sex workers—and the Bush administration’s manifest responsibility for that persecution—in his opening speech to the board? I doubted it, given Piot’s complicity with the Bush administration and because US AIDS commissioner Mark Dybul was chairing the UNAIDS governing board at the time. And so it was: there was not even a single word about the dire situation of Cambodia’s sex workers in Piot’s speech or in any of the discussions in the days of the board meeting. UNAIDS’s fall to being an accomplice in Bush’s war on sex workers was absolute.
It took many mon
ths of protests before the Cambodian government suspended its violent campaign against sex workers. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch both investigated the abuses, revealing that hundreds of sex workers—as well as drug users, beggars, street children, and homeless people—had been held in inhuman conditions in so-called rehabilitation centers, including the government’s infamous Prey Speu and Koh Kor detention centers. The evidence testified to daily beatings, torture, rapes (even of children), and custodial deaths, and suicides to bring an end to the torment. The Economist’s correspondent wrote from Phnom Penh in the summer of 2009, “Barely legible on [Prey Speu’s] grimy walls a few weeks ago were cries for help and whispers of despair from the tormented souls once crammed into its grimy cells. ‘This is to mark that I lived in terror under oppression,’ read one such message.”
As in Cambodia and India, governments the world over began to accede to the United States’ antiprostitution demands. They increased criminal sanctions against sex workers in already existing laws—copying the punitive US model that punishes sex workers with years in jail and prohibitive fines—or weighed new antiprostitution laws that equated sex work with sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation, in this case criminalizing clients as well as sex workers. The list soon included, in addition to Cambodia and India, countries as far-flung and disparate as Bangladesh, the Czech Republic, Guatemala, Lithuania, Mexico, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, and Zambia. It was the rare government, such as Brazil’s, that had the courage to reject the Bush administration’s diktats.
In those countries and many others, the antiprostitution sentiment fueled by the Bush campaign led to government and public violence against sex workers of a deadly purposiveness that had rarely ever been known before. Participating in those campaigns were not just reactionary political parties, the police, and right-wing vigilantes, but also, astonishingly, American-financed and even American-led prohibitionist groups.
In Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, at an increasing pace from 2001 onward, hundreds of sex workers were arrested in violent police raids orchestrated by American-financed prohibitionist organizations and sensationally filmed for prime-time Western TV. The most notorious of those were the International Justice Mission, a Virginia-based group of far-right Christian lawyers and former police officers, and AFESIP (Agir Pour les Femmes en Situation Précaire), headquartered in Cambodia. Both received millions in funding from USAID and other US government bodies, as well as from a vast network of right-wing Christian groups. Even adults who insisted that they were working voluntarily and did not want to be rescued were detained and held forcibly in governmental detention centers or private shelters, in some cases for several weeks, on the pretext that they were victims and needed to be guarded. In case after case, the women escaped the minute they could, often at grave physical danger to themselves, letting themselves down multistory buildings and scaling high walls. An even crueler fate awaited the hundreds of women and older teenagers who were illegal immigrants from Myanmar or Vietnam, who were typically jailed for a year and then deported back to the crisis areas that they had fled in desperation.
In sub-Saharan Africa, where violence against female, trans, and male sex workers by police and thugs is endemic—a consequence of the colonial-era laws that punitively criminalize sex work as well as the stigma that they are AIDS “carriers”—the Bush administration’s antiprostitution campaign intensified their persecution. Zambia launched a mass incarceration of young women suspected of selling sex, with the police publicly whipping sex workers while calling them “bitches who are killing the nation” for spreading AIDS. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, twenty-nine cases of sexual violence against female sex workers by police or military, including rape, kidnapping, and torture, were documented in just three months of 2007. In 2006, a Botswanan judge who sentenced ten Zimbabwean prostitutes to a year in jail justified his decision by saying, “It was time the courts took serious action against these people who are responsible for the spread of HIV/AIDS.”
American-funded evangelical Christian clergy—and often visiting American preachers themselves—led those witch hunts, urging their governments and followers to execute sex workers, lesbians, gay men, and trans women, as they were to blame them for those countries’ AIDS epidemics. The inflaming of state-led and popular homophobia—in Kenya, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Uganda, ruling dictators (some allied closely with successive US administrations) pushed for laws to execute gay men—was another signal lesson about the folly of involving right-wing Christians or other zealots in anything to do with AIDS or sexuality, as the Bush administration had done as a main plank of its AIDS policies.
In India, too, the Bush campaign ignited a storm of violence against sex workers. Revealingly, the violence was concentrated in the half-dozen states where the Hindu supremacist parties held sway: in the BJP and Shiv Sena, the Bush administration had found truly receptive allies for its hypocritical and violent views about sex work.
Indeed, regarding all women, there was a vivid similarity between the views of the right-wing Christians allied to Bush and Hindu extremists: a core belief of both was that the proper role for women was to be faithful and submissive to patriarchal men and to forgo rights and autonomy, as men were their God-anointed protectors. The commonality in their views was ironic, as the Hindu supremacists vilifed India’s Christians, maintaining that Christianity and Islam were inherently violent religions that had been imposed on peaceable Hindus by marauding colonizers. Hindu-supremacist violence against Christians had escalated during the eight years of BJP national rule (ending in 2004 when the Congress Party was voted in), the savagery including the torching to death of the Australian missionary Graham Staines—who had long worked with leprosy sufferers in Orissa’s villages—and his two young children.
In the view of the Hindu supremacists, Indian women had to embody Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the revanchist Hindu motherland they dreamed of establishing. They had to be goddesslike, to be chaste until marriage, and then to have dutiful sex with their husbands to create sons—daughters wouldn’t do—who would become foot soldiers for the Hindutva (“Hinduness”) cause.
There was no place in the misogynistic “motherland” for women who insisted that they had equal rights with men, particularly the right to refuse sex and childbearing or to have it freely or for money with individuals of their own choosing. It said everything that the two sets of women routinely targeted for violence by Hindu-supremacist men and women were those known to be sex workers or those they considered Westernized and immoral—which they equated with even merely wearing jeans or owning a cell phone or for wishing to marry someone of their own choosing.
The Hindu-supremacist groups had begun persecuting sex workers even before President Bush’s campaign further fanned their animus. In 2002, in Nippani, a small town in Karnataka’s Belgaum district, years of HIV prevention efforts by Sangram/VAMP were destroyed by the Shiv Sena Party and its vigilantes, who attacked the collective’s local office, beat sex workers, and barred them from returning to their homes. The local Shiv Sena leader pronounced, “Under the garb of the HIV/AIDS prevention programme, these women are promoting prostitution.” Far from defending the women, the local police chief refused to act on their complaint, calling them “bloody veshyas [whores] and not normal citizens,” threatening to “strip all the sex workers in the public square and beat them black and blue” and to arrest them under antiprostitution laws.
With their views legitimized by President Bush, the Hindu-supremacist forces launched a sustained campaign against sex workers. (On matters relating to AIDS and sexuality, the BJP’s leaders routinely looked to Bush—thus, Sushma Swaraj, minister of health and family welfare in the BJP federal government until 2004, had approvingly cited Bush’s “ABC” model in insisting that India’s AIDS efforts should move away from promoting condom use to advocating abstinence and faithfulness.) What unfolded was far more devastatin
g than even the terrible abuses sex workers had suffered in the first decade of India’s AIDS epidemic. While the earlier mass raids and imprisonment had been episodic, knee-jerk actions fueled by hysteria about the disease, the efforts this time appeared almost aimed at eradicating the women themselves, as if they were foul blots on Indian culture that had to be obliterated.
In late 2003, with the BJP still in power at the federal level, the Gujarat government of Narendra Modi invoked the national antitrafficking act and other laws to evict nearly seven hundred sex workers and their children from Surat’s Chakla Bazar, even though the area had been home to sex workers for countless years. The following year the BJP government in Goa demolished the vast Baina slum and red-light area, which I had visited a decade earlier while with the World Bank. Bulldozers razed more than a thousand brick-and-tin shanties, leaving hundreds of sex workers and their children, as well as thousands of other migrant squatters who were not connected to sex work, homeless and defenseless in the midst of the ferocious monsoon storms. The government then moved to deport the sex workers to their home states, even though many had lived in Baina for years and had no other home.
Baina, demolished
In Uttar Pradesh, the homes and workplaces of sex workers in cities such as Allahabad, Lucknow, and Meerut were torched or razed by Hindu extremists. Then there was the series of American abolitionist-led raids in 2005 and 2006 in the small towns of Maharashtra where Sangram/VAMP worked. That year, dance bars—featuring Bollywood-style mujras by fully clad women whom the men could admire but not touch or proposition—were banned throughout Maharashtra for allegedly being a front for trafficking and prostitution. More than a hundred thousand women lost highly paid jobs, forcing many to turn to sex work—many of them went to Middle Eastern countries to sell sex, facing an even higher risk of abuse and exploitation. In 2007, in Karnataka’s Channapatana, with a BJP government in the offing, goons and the police brutally attacked sex workers who had gathered to demonstrate peacefully against police brutality. In Bihar, ruled by the BJP-allied Janata Dal United, mobs attacked sex workers in Sitamarhi town and burned down 250 homes while the police stood by.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 30
