The Kovalam conference by Organised by the National Legal Services Authority

[Guest guest]

In Health Ministry's AIIMS, AIDS no objective

Chandan Mitra

It was probably the most high profile and meaningful meeting on the

issue of Trafficking and HIV/AIDS. Organised by the National Legal

Services Authority (NALSA), a statutory body headed by the Chief

Justice of India, and the UNDP-TAHA project, it brought together

judicial luminaries, two dozen MPs, top bureaucrats from 11 States

where the UNDP-funded project is going on, and head honchos of all

major voluntary organisations working in the arena of HIV/AIDS and

human trafficking.

Significantly, however, one crucial component was missing. No senior

representative of the nodal Government agency, National AIDS Control

Organisation (NACO) was present. Nor were any officials from the

Union Health Ministry. Apparently, they were detained in Delhi to

assist their belligerent Minister, Dr Anbumani Ramadoss, exact

terrible vengeance on India's highly celebrated cardiac surgeon Dr P

Venugopal.

But why was NACO, the officially designated body for AIDS control,

also absent? Some speculated it was the result of a turf war: NACO

was unwilling to cede any space even to NALSA on AIDS-related

issues. Others said they took the cue from the Health Minister's

current obsession: AIDS could wait; Dr Venugopal's ouster could not.

These abstentions came in for sharp criticism from other

participants. First, BJP MP Vinay Katiyar mentioned this. Thereafter

Amar Singh, Samajwadi Party general-secretary took serious exception

to it. And finally, Supreme Court's senior-most judge, Justice KG

Balakrishnan, executive president of NALSA, roundly condemned the

Ministry's and NACO's attitude.

Considering Justice Balakrishnan will soon become CJI and hold the

position till 2010, the absentees may have really asked for trouble.

Dr Ramadoss keeps queering his own pitch!

The two-day conference at the Leela Kempinski resort in picturesque

Kovalam on Thiruvananthapuram's outskirts on July 8 and 9 threw up

some new dimensions on the issue. Particularly significant was the

linkage made between trafficking and HIV/AIDS. This was perhaps the

first occasion that so many policy makers interacted with those

implementing the policies on the ground.

Sushma Swaraj, Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on

Home Affairs, made a major contribution to the discussion by virtue

of her experience as Health Minister in the NDA Government. She

emphatically called for enactment of a Victim Protection Protocol

for trafficked women to bring them legally on par with rape victims.

Justice Nazik Bilal of the Andhra Pradesh High Court pointed to the

multiplicity of Acts with regard to trafficking and asked if there

were enough policemen to enforce them or enough magistrates and

judges to try those cases. There was a sustained debate on the

advisability of Section 5© of the Immorally Trafficked Persons Act

(ITPA), which has replaced the erstwhile SITA. The disputed clause,

many participants such as lawyer Anand Grover and former sex worker

Putul Singh argued, would " criminalise " clients whereas the need was

to de-criminalise the profession.

Almost all participants emphasised the relationship between

trafficking and AIDS. They pressed Government agencies, particularly

NACO, to broaden its horizon, not to look at AIDS as a purely

medical problem that could be curbed by enhancing free distribution

of condoms, but also address the social and psychological dimensions

of both HIV-infected and trafficked people, especially women and

children.

In many senses, the two-day interaction between MPs representing

seven Parliamentary Standing Committees, the higher judiciary,

Government and non-Government organisations, was an eye-opener for

us. Interestingly, it also marked a serious effort by the judiciary

to reach out to various agencies and acknowledge the need to

sensitise magistrates and judges to the human dimension of this

humungous problem. Several delegates pointed to the fact that

despite lot of official efforts and deployment of resources the

number of HIV-infected persons in India had gone up from one in 1986

to over 5 million in 2006.

The presence of four Standing Committee chairpersons, Ms Sushma

Swaraj, Mr Amar Singh, Ms Sumitra Mahajan and EMS Natchiappan, and

MPs like SS Ahluwalia, Vinay Katiyar, Anusuiya Uikey (all BJP) K

Chandran Pillai, P Madhu, Sebastian (CPI-M), SG Indira (TDP),

DK Sharma, Silvius Condopan (Congress) and this correspondent, lent

an importance to the brainstorming rarely experienced hitherto. This

will undoubtedly impact the forthcoming debate on the long-awaited

AIDS Bill 2005 in Parliament.

The Kovalam conference was the first foray into a wide consultative

process by the judiciary. Hopefully, this will become the norm on

many social issues that have a legal and legislative dimension. If

the legislature, judiciary and executive engage in such dialogue

along with NGOs in different specialised areas, both the framing of

laws and their implementation could improve dramatically.

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