Book review: The untold story of how India's sex workers prevented an Aids epidemic
A Stranger Truth by Ashok Alexander
Reviewed by Amrit Dhillon
Reviewed by Amrit Dhillon
Beating Aids is India’s greatest public health achievement. A new book
says it wouldn’t have happened without women
In 2002, a major
report predicted an Aids catastrophe in India. The country would have 20-25m
Aids cases by 2010. People were being infected at the rate of about 1,000 a
day. Aids orphans numbered 2 million. This scourge would ravage families,
society, and the economy. India was
going to be the Aids capital of the world. But 2010 came and
went. India averted an Aids epidemic. That victory – India’s biggest public
health achievement – has remained uncelebrated. But a new book by one of the
major HIV campaigners of that time finally honours the people he says were
crucial in guiding India away from its seemingly inescapable destiny: the
country’s sex workers.
Ashok Alexander spent
a decade at the helm of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s campaign
against HIV. In his book, A Stranger Truth: Lessons in Love, Leadership and
Courage from India’s Sex Workers, he says the miracle would never
have happened without the cooperation of sex workers. Alexander, 64, was
born into India’s elite. His father, PC Alexander, was principal secretary to
Indira Gandhi. In leaving his career as senior director in the India office of
McKinsey & Company to join the campaign to stop the spread of HIV,
Alexander swapped a life of plush boardrooms and fine dining with CEOs for
sitting on mud floors with sex workers, gay and transgender people and
intravenous drug users. In short, a world of which he had little knowledge.
His account begins
with his first day in the field, walking through a park in Vizag, in south
India, in pitch darkness. As they navigated around couples having sex on the
grass or behind the bushes, a local NGO worker urged: “Please don’t step on the
people having sex.” This was where sex
work took place in India – in parks, at bus stops, on street corners. The fact
that brothels accounted for only 7% of sex work presented a fundamental
difficulty for the success of Avahan, as the foundation’s programme was called.
How do you contain an epidemic in a setting where women are not clustered in
one place, but dispersed and on the move? Where sex workers on the highways
would get picked up by truckers then, when finished, cross the road to return
on another truck?.. read more:
