by Juliette Terzieff
– USA –
Officials in several Indian states are defying the federal government’s edict to include updated sex education in public school curriculum on the grounds that the subject matter is too explicit or that it counters Indian culture. For India, the country with the world’s largest caseload of HIV/AIDS patients, it is an emotive battle between necessity and tradition, taking place against the backdrop of a deadly race against time.
Over 5.7 million Indians are already infected, according to the United Nations – a figure that UNAIDS/WHO predicts could top 12 million by 2010. Almost a third of those currently infected are between 18-29 years of age.
The states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan have rejected the new sex education curriculum introduced last year, with the government in Madhya Pradesh announcing plans to introduce yoga classes in schools instead. At least two other states including Karnataka and Kerala are considering bans.
Critics argue the government’s education initiative will lead to increased sexual activity among Indian youth, while supporters counter that a failure to act puts young lives at risk. The course elements most hotly contested center on the textbook’s diagrams, discussions of homosexuality and descriptions of various sex acts.
“The government has devaluated Indian culture and its values. Instead, the younger generations should be taught about yoga, Indian culture and its values,” Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh wrote recently in an angry letter to India’s Education Ministry.
Yet a survey late last year by the weekly newsmagazine, India Today, found that 1-in-4 women aged 18 to 30 have had sex before marriage, and 1-in-3 was open to having sexual relations even if she was not in love. A more scientific survey undertaken by the National AIDS Coordination Organization found 8 percent of Indian teenagers to be sexually active.
Over 85 percent of HIV infections in India are transmitted through sexual intercourse and yet as few as 21-28 percent of rural women show an understanding of infection transmission. Many Indian women have never even heard of HIV/AIDS.
“Sex education does not mean you are encouraging sex, which is how some elements interpret it,” India’s Minister for Women and Child Development, Renuka Chowdhury, recently told journalists. “Sex education is an insurance for your child. It will protect your child.”
India’s battle against HIV/AIDS has been extraordinarily difficult.
Indian officials were slow to publicly recognize the problem, allowing the rampant and largely unchecked spread of the disease throughout the early 1990s. Officials did routinely earmark 20 percent of the country’s World Bank funds for “targeted interventions” among high-risk groups, but public awareness campaigns were sporadic and heavily censored.
Initially, the disease did spread primarily in high-risk categories – sex workers, homosexuals and intravenous drug users – and officials hoped that targeting programs to these specific groups would prevent a jump to other populations. Some Indian politicians went as far as to say that the disease might solve India’s overpopulation problems as the country’s estimated 2.3 million female prostitutes and 1.2 million hijra (an Urdu term for transsexuals, cross-dressers, hermaphrodites and castrated men) saw their ranks decimated in the early stages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Even as health workers screamed warnings of the disease’s spread, Indian security forces routinely targeted groups and individuals working to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS amongst homosexual and sex worker communities – harassing, beating, and detaining dozens of health care workers using the colonial-era Section 377 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes “unnatural acts”, to justify their actions.
In one notable 2003 incident police arrested a half-dozen female staff members of Samuha Samraksha in the city of Bangalore for their HIV/AIDS prevention efforts and then rubbed hot peppers in their eyes and mouths, and in the vagina of one detainee. Samraksha, set up in 1993, works predominantly with migrant workers, street children and those inhabiting slum areas.
Men who have sex with men face pervasive stigma in India and many homosexuals disguise being gay by getting married, which resulted in housewives becoming one of the subsequent groups to display significant increases in infection rates. An estimated 40 percent of Bombay’s male sex workers are married, according to health care groups working in the teeming Indian metropolis. Health workers also began to see sharp rises in children infected in utero or through breastfeeding.
“Women and children are often left out of the equation,” argues Anjali Gopalan, founder and executive director of the Delhi-based Naz Foundation.
“And it’s not just HIV. Many young women are forced by their families to drop out of school or end up married off at a young age and later have no access to safe delivery methods. Most are without even a solid understanding of their reproductive systems and risks of HIV/AIDS.”
“Children in particular are vulnerable and have multiple needs that need to be considered very carefully, including issues of educating children and placing their needs firmly within the overall framework of AIDS efforts,” believes Gopalan. In 1994 she launched the Naz Foundation, which runs prevention programs and a home for HIV-positive children in Delhi, out of frustration with India’s lack of response to the burgeoning crisis.
As HIV/AIDS spread from the so-called high-risk groups into the general population, Indian officials finally began a hearty battle in late 2005 against social taboos that prevent the open discussion of sexual topics even in the most liberal sections of society. Sexual topics are buried so far in the proverbial closet that even most Indian mothers do not discuss menstruation with their daughters.
In addition to last year’s education initiative, India’s National AIDS Control Organization presented its most-recent anti-AIDS program on May 17th, requesting $2 billion in federal funding over a five-year period for prevention efforts and the provision of antiretroviral drugs.
Finance Minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, admitted on May 24th that HIV/AIDS cases in India are under-reported, due largely in part to the stigma attached to the disease, but promised the government is ready to address the crisis.
“We now recognize it is a serious problem and it is good (that) we are not in a state of denial anymore,” Chidabaram said.
While health workers and HIV/AIDS campaigners have cheered the federal government’s new attitude, the bitterly contested fight over introducing comprehensive sex education into Indian schools shows just how hard the battle will be.
About the Author
Juliette Terzieff is a freelance journalist, currently based in Clearwater, FL, who has worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, CNN International, Women’s eNews and the London Sunday Times during time spent in the Balkans, the Middle East and South Asia.
Conservative cultures such as India’s are a threat to finding a solution to the HIV and Aids pandemic. Organisations in countries with such conservative cultures must work very hard to raise awareness on this pandemic.