Re: Amendments of Immoral Traffick Prevention Act ( ITPA )

[Guest guest]

Dear Forum,

Nice to see that a long research article, all the way from Honolulu, USA,

attempts to support the proposed Amendments to the Indian ITPA act. [by Subir

K. Kole. /message/6423]

It cleverly argues that women in " neo-liberal capitalism " have the right to make

money from sex but not the women of impoverished nations, such as India. To

borrow its own words, it permits the " availability of women's bodies in the

market to satiate the natural, uncontrollable men-lust " for the 'most advanced'

countries alone, but vehemently fights against such a possibility for other

nations.

Further it states that the marginalized women in prostitution must never be

punished, but every one else including the clients should be targetted, even if

they are akin to consumers who unknowingly purchase things produced in slavery

conditions.

After exposing the 'disastrous' positions of women empowerment attempted by

SANGRAM, the article itself falls prey to serious anomalies of another order.

Such contradictions keep occuring in our painstaking arguments, largely because

we bye-pass the fundamental issues, more as a rule than as an exception. We keep

murmuring that the uncontrollable lust and the permanent poverty are the

twin-culprits of the menace we seek to put an end to; but we would rather

enforce laws to crush the symptoms, or tolerate symptoms with sufficient HIV

prevention management but never concentrate on fundamentals as such.

Issues are here to stay. Keep up the debate and let the elite prostitute

continue to mint money or the poor women continue to be trafficked.

The basic questions of uncontrollable lust and permanent poverty need to at

least enter our debates, if ever we are serious on tackling them.

Strange as it may sound, it's precisely our law of marriage that has whipped up

our lust beyond cure. And poverty gets perpetuated due to our safe-guards on

profit and private property. Abundance breeds abundance and poverty breeds

poverty. Is this principle of economics new to any one? If Mukesh Ambani gets

the highest yearly income of all Indians, is it due to his extra-ordinary

talents or his accumulated wealth?

Why then people didn't come up with laws such as per centage of yearly income to

be necessarily administered on social projects benefitting the poor, along broad

guide-lines set up by the Govt., over and above the tax regime, required for the

administration of the country? The social projects of the Govt. have their own

weakness, as proved until date. Hence I am not arguing for a greater pie for

Govt. projects.

The income levels of individuals are becoming more and more visible and the

right to information on complex govt. functioning is already in our hands right

now. Will it then require too much of intelligence to work out a system that

corrects the fundamental law of economics, namely abundance breeds abundance and

poverty breeds poverty. Forget for a while all sorts of donations and grants. We

need hard core laws necessitating private management of social projects and they

are definitely possible.

The pull back of FDI will instantly be in the mind of the Finance Minister.

That's certainly the price we pay for the level of globalization that has swept

across our commerce and industry. But precisely due to globalization, a friend

in Honolulu can invigorate the anti-prostitution lobby here in India, within a

day or two. Why not to utilize the same tools and respond to the researcher in

Honolulu that unless and until the law of distribution is ensured in some form

or the other all over the globe, trafficking and prostitution are here to stay

and simpler laws criminalizing the symptoms will never serve the purpose.

Coming to the law of marriage, human beings are capable of managing multiple

agreements honorably, including long term commitments involving children and

short term agreements involving health risks. Any attempt to reduce him/her to a

pre-scientific era of fear and simplistic moralism will repeatedly fail and keep

the issue of prostitution, legal or illegal, live and kicking.

Regards,

E.Rajarethinam

e-mail: globalcitizens@...