Forcible HIV testing by India amounts to discrimination

By allowing people with HIV/Aids to enter the US after January 1, next year, President Obama is holding up to shame countries left behind in removing discrimination against people who are infected.

The countries — and there are about a dozen of them — include India, which hosts thousands of African university students, many from Kenya. In a move apparently aimed at arresting the spread of the scourge, India still needs foreign students — most of them African or Asian — to take compulsory HIV tests. If they prove positive they are deported.

The mandatory testing of foreign students — there some 30,000 foreign students in India — not only discriminates against them, but also violates their basic human rights. It is particularly demeaning for people from a continent widely suspected to be the origin of Aids. Government centres in India have been carrying out these tests for more than two decades now, although forced testing violates international law.

ARTICLE 17 OF THE INTERNATIONAL Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article states: “No-one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy”. And the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, in a report issued on Aids and human rights, says:

“The right to privacy covers obligations to respect physical privacy, including the obligation to seek informed consent to HIV testing, and also privacy of information, including the need to respect confidentiality of all information relating to a person’s HIV status.”

The report adds that the individual’s interest in his privacy is particularly context of HIV/Aids, firstly, because of the invasive character a mandatory HIV test, and secondly, because of the stigma and discrimination attached to the loss of privacy and confidentiality.

Testing for HIV infection should be voluntary, and conducted only if an individual gives informed consent after pre-test counselling. When it is made mandatory for a selected group of foreigners, it stigmatises. And it does not help India to fight HIV/Aids. It is futile.

Testing is needed before one can get the residence permit, but the testing does not take into account the “window period”. A test is cannot detect the presence of the virus during the “window period”, even though the person is infected and infectious. One, however, gets the feeling that India thinks that by requiring mandatory HIV screening for Africans, it is stopping the spread of HIV/Aids, that the disease comes from Africa, and that India “will not become another Africa”.

The exercise shows unthinkable insensitivity. It is surprising that no African government has publicly put diplomatic pressure on New Delhi to stop the absurd exercise. Susan Sontag’s Aids and Its Metaphors shows well this accusatory side of Aids infection: how fears, paranoia and stigma are associated with the disease, as well as how it is always assumed that the disease comes from somewhere else, that it is someone else’s fault.

When the first Indian Aids case was diagnosed in 1986, the media and government officials attributed the disease to foreigners or returning Indians. The director-general of the Indian Council of Medical Research went as far as demanding a legal ban on sex with foreigners and non-resident Indians.

Foreign students were then screened and nine out of an estimated 1,200 at that time were found to be HIV-positive and deported. The government made it mandatory for all foreigners who intended to live in India for longer than a year to undergo a test.

BUT DESPITE THE QUARANTINE ON HIV-positive foreigners, the spread of Aids in India continues. In 2006, UNAids estimated that there were 5.6 million people living with HIV in India, that is more than in any other country in the world. In 2007, following the first survey of HIV among the general population, UNAids and India’s National Aids Control Organisation agreed on a new estimate of between 2 million and 3.1 million people living with HIV.

Last year, the figure was confirmed to be 2.5 million, a prevalence of 0.3 per cent. Because of the size of India’s population — nearly 1 billion — a prevalence of 0.3 per cent translates into large numbers of people living with Aids. Clearly, screening foreigners has had no effect on the Indian levels of infection. The sure way to prevent Aids is behaviour change, not blaming foreign students.

gigirimwaura@yahoo.com