The commission reserved its most scathing criticism for the police. “The one constant refrain from women at all meetings held by the National Commission for Women was to ‘do something about the police,’ ” the report noted bluntly. “The women are arrested under charges of ‘possession of condoms,’ or even on false charges of ‘possession of narcotics.’ . . . The women are rounded up at the end of the month when the target for petty/minor offences are not met by the particular police station . . . Some police officers are known by name to be self-avowed crusaders against ‘prostitutes.’ ” Adding insult to injury, the police raked in a fortune from the hard work of those impoverished women through the massive bribes they extorted, the commission noted.
The commission lambasted India’s laws and judiciary. The laws and their prejudiced application—whether it was the federal antiprostitution law or the myriad state and local laws employed against sex workers—“victimizes the women,” the report emphasized. For instance, antivagrancy laws that regulate the uses of public spaces, including footpaths and parks, were routinely used to arrest sex workers. “No other citizen is usually charged for the offence of vagrancy, which is the law most often operating against the women in sex work,” the commission wrote sharply.
One egregious section of the federal antiprostitution law gave magistrates unchecked power to have a sex worker evicted from her home or premises in the “interests of the general public” or “if there is a complaint against her.” The commission asked, with palpable outrage, “How will such a procedure stand the test of ‘reasonable restriction’?” (While reading the report, it struck me just how completely all those anti–sex work laws were no less an alien legacy than Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalized gay men, all of them malignant hand-me-downs from British colonial rule. Recent research by both British and Indian historians showed that in precolonial India the diverse categories of women who were entertainers or sold sex had not been considered immoral, much less been criminalized—with temple dancers and courtesans commanding social respect, and less elevated categories being treated with at least relative tolerance. But during the nineteenth century their social and legal status was destructively and lastingly redefined as the East India Company and then the colonial government promoted regulated brothel prostitution to service British soldiers at the same time as criminalizing these women and portraying them as congenitally immoral individuals from degraded “prostitute castes.”)
That sweeping survey was followed by reams of recommendations. The commission asked for legal reform, an end to police abuse, guaranteed affordable housing, ration cards to enable sex workers to buy subsidized food staples, and electoral identity cards so that they could exercise their basic citizenship right to vote—heartbreaking to read, because they confirmed just how much had been denied to them. The commission even had to urge that condoms be considered “life saving equipment,” not used as a pretext for police to arrest sex workers. The recommendations were not legally enforceable, but the institution had been established to advise the government, and its views carried weight.
I was filled with admiration to note that Mohini Giri had left intact the views of sex workers, prominently highlighted in boxed sections, even when they sharply disagreed with the commission.
Their disagreement was blistering on the crucial issue of legal reforms. The sex workers clearly felt that the commission had not gone far enough. They called for real emancipation—and for that, they stressed, the law and the police would have to be entirely removed from their lives through a complete repeal of all prostitution-related laws. They had no patience for reforms that implicitly disapproved of sex work and sought its ending, when it was the most lucrative of the work options available to them as impoverished, largely illiterate women. They wanted adequate protections for sex workers so that they could continue to earn well from this livelihood option.
“There should not be any laws against prostitution,” they stated categorically. “There should be no fines; there should not be ‘demand reduction’ in our services or else we will starve.” (I was struck that India’s sex workers had arrived at many of the conclusions of Priscilla Alexander and other Western advocates for sex workers’ rights, despite hailing from a completely different setting.)
The most moving revelation of all came in the report’s very last pages. It was the text of a recent petition by Selvi and six other sex workers, addressed to the government’s National Human Rights Commission. Their petition focused on the arrest of several hundred sex workers in Mumbai in February 1996—on the orders of the High Court—who had then been forcibly tested for HIV and either deported to their home states or held captive indefinitely.
Selvi and her cosignatories had submitted the petition as members of the Representative Inter-State Committee of Sex Workers in India, urging the National Human Rights Commission to demand the release of those sex workers. “The members of this committee,” they wrote, “have discussed this situation and the violations, and wish to record their anger and deep sorrow at the gross injustice that is being done. We submit that the below mentioned parties be held responsible, and urged to remedy the inhuman and illegal situation thus created.” They named Mumbai’s commissioner of police, the National AIDS Control Organization, and state health officials as the responsible parties.
The petition had come almost exactly a decade from the time Selvi had been imprisoned in the Madras reformatory. There she was, in those words, fighting to free hapless women who were in exactly the same cruel situation she had been in, of being incarcerated not for a substantiated crime but simply because they were HIV-infected and sold sex.
The dramatic change in Selvi’s situation seemed to embody a tantalizing turning point. Though the abuses of sex workers hadn’t diminished, many people were now challenging those abuses. The sex workers’ cause was so visibly just that it had moved and drawn in people from a diversity of backgrounds, from activist journalists to public health specialists, and now even to influential establishment feminists and human rights defenders. Most promising, thousands of sex workers were themselves on the front lines of those battles, not only having succeeded in overcoming the crippling shame and self-loathing that had been foisted on them but having united to fight for their own emancipation. Things had changed in breathtaking ways that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years back.
Everywhere in those years there were signs of what seemed to be the stirring of a revolution for India’s sex workers. India was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary of independence, and more than anything else I knew of, that development, that the most cruelly stigmatized women seemed to be on the path to winning their rights to dignity, self-determination, and inclusion, filled me with hope that the country was set on a progressive, inspiring path.
In November 1997, just a few months after India had celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, Shyamala Nataraj and a dozen others from SIAAP were among five thousand sex workers and activists who reached Calcutta from far-flung parts of the country for the first national conference of sex workers. I longed to go, especially as the conference was in my hometown, but I had just moved to New York City to join UNICEF. The conference was the work of another pathbreaking sex workers’ collective with the assertive name of Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee—Bengali for Indomitable Women’s Collaborative Committee.
Durbar, as the group is popularly known, like Nataraj’s group in Madras, had originated from an HIV prevention effort begun as recently as 1992 in Calcutta’s largest red-light area, Sonagachi. It had proved to be so useful that about thirty thousand sex workers had joined the collective; its staff included 261 sex workers as educators and team leaders, besides a hundred other professionals, many of them the adult children of sex workers; it operated a network of vital services from health clinics to crèches to vocational training programs; its cooperative savings bank had freed the women from the stranglehold of local moneylenders; and the establishment of self-regulatory boards with strong gov
ernment and community representation was bringing to an end the trafficking of girls and women.
Sex workers and activists from all across the country excitedly crowded into Salt Lake Stadium, an iconic venue. Those who understood contemporary Bengal’s politics realized what volumes that fact itself—that their conference was being held at that historic place—spoke of how much headway their cause had already made in the state. The stadium had been the gathering point for fiery political rallies since the 1960s, by impoverished Bengalis who backed the local Marxist Party—with its commitment to direly needed pro-poor reforms—against the ossified and increasingly repressive Congress Party. Now here were women, hijras, and men who sold sex for a living insisting that their demand for respect and rights was a legitimate political cause.
None other than India’s home minister, the legendary freedom fighter and Communist leader Indrajit Gupta, came to the function as its chief guest. It was an astonishing political statement, as Gupta’s post was the most influential national position after that of the prime minister. “The women from SIAAP I was with almost couldn’t believe it,” Nataraj recalled. “And when he appeared on the dais we were blown away, because he was this distinguished, grandfatherly figure who exuded a huge moral authority.”
In an opening speech delivered in Bengali, Gupta told the wildly cheering audience that he empathized with sex workers. No one should be allowed to abuse or persecute them, he said, and explicitly not the police, pointing to his armed bodyguards. To a crescendo of cheers and clapping, Gupta said he supported their demands for decriminalizing sex work and providing them the full panoply of human rights. He assured them that he would take the fight to Parliament.
It was testimony to how far India’s political democracy had progressed. In the 1920s, when a group of Bengali sex workers had repeatedly volunteered to join Mahatma Gandhi in the anticolonial struggle, he had angrily refused unless they repented and left the trade, describing them as “unrepentant professional murderers” and “more dangerous than thieves, because they steal virtue.” Gandhi’s harshness—all the more inexcusable given his pleas for compassion for other stigmatized people, such as “untouchables,” whom he called “Children of God”—sprang from his obsessive hostility to sexual desire. It had to do partly with guilt-ridden incidents in his youth, when he had come close to having sex with sex workers and experienced conflicted desires that, like the usual run of men, he blamed on the women rather than on himself. But now, so in contrast, here was India’s incumbent home minister speaking of them with respect and fighting for their rights!
Indrajit Gupta didn’t get the chance to deliver on the promise he made at Salt Lake Stadium, as the fragile coalition government fell just a few months later. The right-wing government that came to power in 1998—led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP—was fundamentally opposed to social progress for the marginalized. I knew it would abort the commitments made by Gupta as well as the recent recommendations of the National Commission for Women; but even that disappointing setback at the time seemed a blip in an inexorable and astonishingly fast march forward for sex workers.
The Durbar sex workers demonstrate against punitive laws
In March 2001, remembering my regret at missing the 1997 national conference, I made sure to go to the Millennium Milan Mela, or “celebratory fair,” organized by the Durbar. My book on AIDS had just been published, and I was in Calcutta for the first leg of a nationwide speaking tour. The fair was intended to mark the dawn of a new millennium of progress for sex workers, and its opening day—March 3—would henceforth be celebrated as International Sex Workers’ Rights Day, the Durbar, Indian, and worldwide sex worker groups announced. (By that time, with increased internet and mobile phone access in India and other developing countries, sex workers’ rights groups worldwide had begun to come together and some years later would form the Global Network of Sex Work Projects.) What I witnessed at the Mela left me awestruck at what those women had managed to achieve in less than a decade.
Outside Salt Lake Stadium, huge crowds were milling and queuing up for tickets, the atmosphere carnival-like with loud music and announcements blaring from speakers. Inside, the crowd of thousands consisted overwhelmingly of everyday couples and families with children of all ages. They seemed interested in every aspect of the fair—relishing the food stalls and folk dances from all over India or listening intently to the panel discussions about the realities of sex work and the need for decriminalization and other changes. Nobody seemed to notice or remark, let alone react negatively to knowing, that the people manning the stalls, doing the dance performances, and speaking with great passion during the discussions were women sex workers and their children, with a sprinkling of hijra and kothi sex workers. There was no leering. There was no rudeness. All present acted exactly as they would at a more routine fair.
It was thrilling to witness, and I felt enormous pride in being a child of this state, with its century-long history of progressive politics, where people had come to so deeply value egalitarianism and justice. Wandering through the fair that afternoon, watching the confident, cheerful sex workers and the engrossed crowds, I felt optimistic about India in a way that I never had before. Perhaps the marked gentleness characteristic of many Indians and the lack of polarized views on most social matters—in such sharp contrast to the United States, where many people seem to be permanently inflamed with self-righteous moralizing—meant that we Indians now had the unique potential for building a just and humane society? Otherwise, what would be the point of the egalitarian possibilities offered by the democracy that had taken such strong roots in the past half century as well as the highs of philosophical understanding that had emerged here over the millennia? As I stood there at the fair amid the crowds and the noise and the music and the sex workers, every kind of progress seemed thrillingly possible.
SIXTEEN
AN ERA OF UNCERTAINTY
The AIDS epidemic was also ravaging gay men and hijras across India, but for them there were there were no feisty path-breaking collectives, let alone carnivals and national conferences attended by national leaders. For all that, the changes for gay men and hijras—our sisters in arms—were real.
I began to learn about many of those changes in the company of V. Sekar, a gay man in Chennai who in 1999 generously volunteered to help me with research for the book on AIDS that I was working on. Sekar was resolutely open not just about being gay but also about being HIV-positive. I felt afraid for him on both counts.
Barely anyone outside elite circles was open about being gay. And even now, a dozen years into India’s epidemic, people discovered to be HIV-positive were facing horrific persecution, driven to suicide in many cases. But here was Sekar, a slight figure in a colorless safari suit that hinted at his precarious finances, looking immeasurably older than his mid-thirties because of his thinning hair and skin turned gray from ill health, insisting on speaking out on both matters.
Sekar had been diagnosed with HIV in the early 1990s. Desperate for help, he had soon reached out to Shyamala Nataraj at SIAAP, and there he had been befriended by activist sex workers, including Selvi and Mary Thomas. He had ended up becoming an AIDS activist, as resolute and outspoken as the women he emulated. Much like what Selvi had done with other sex workers in SIAAP’s formative days—literally going up to them and saying she had AIDS and wanted others to be spared it—Sekar started doing in gay cruising areas, encouraging men to start using condoms and counseling those who turned to him with their fears about AIDS.
In 1996, with counseling experience of his own and with seed funding and technical advice from SIAAP, Sekar set up Anbu Illam, or House of Love, to provide counseling on HIV to the city’s gay and bisexual men. But at that point, the Tamil Nadu state government dismissed Sekar’s urging that large numbers of men were contracting HIV from sex with other men or hijras. “The government kept insisting that the ‘MSM’ population is very small,” Sekar explained. (“MSM” is the acronym for “men who
have sex with men,” an umbrella term that became widespread in the field of HIV prevention to describe the reality in India and elsewhere that men who enjoy sex with other men or with trans women often do so without considering themselves to be gay or even bisexual. Its poor fit vis-à-vis trans women is self-evident, as usually they themselves and the men who have sex with them consider them to be women or of an alternative gender, but certainly not men.)
“I told them that the population is, in fact, large and that many were getting infected,” said Sekar. “It is only that these men are not visible—that it is a hidden, invisible population. But the government did not listen. They didn’t understand that whenever a man who is gay goes to the hospital and doctors ask him questions about how he got infected with HIV or an STD, he always says that it happened from sex with women. No man will admit that he had sex with another man or aravani!” (Aravani is the preferred Tamil term for hijra.)
Without consistent financial support, Anbu Illam folded in a matter of years. But Sekar continued to be doggedly open about having contracted HIV from gay sex, turning him into living, incontrovertible proof that the AIDS epidemic was taking its toll among our ranks and that HIV prevention services were desperately needed. He didn’t seem perturbed to take on that fraught role, which even Dominic D’Souza, for all his public courage, had avoided less than a decade earlier.
I wondered at Sekar’s courage, but I found that every community direly affected by AIDS was producing its own leaders who transformed how that community dealt with that disease in terms of overcoming denial and of spearheading prevention and support. Among Chennai’s sex workers there had been Selvi. Among gay men, there was Sekar. And among the city’s aravanis or hijras, it was Noori.
Noori was working with a “positive people” network when we first met but soon thereafter started her own grassroots group, focused on aiding aravanis. She was a striking figure—forceful and tall, her sari wound awkwardly around her like wrapping paper, wearing traditional makeup on her strong, square-jawed features. She didn’t know her age and brushed off my queries, but from what I could tell she was in her late forties. “I found out many years ago that I was infected with AIDS,” Noori told me. “I was in Bombay then, living in a rented house with other aravanis. I earned most of my money through sex with men. But after finding out that I was infected, I never sold sex again.
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