BOOKS: A STRANGER TRUTH
Over 20 million people had died of AIDS before the world’s elite paid heed to the carnage. Then, belatedly, the disease became the global cause du jour. Billionaires and movie stars vied to declare their abiding concern for the AIDS-stricken, notably for ‘innocent’ women and children. Bill and Melinda Gates were in the vanguard of this elite, though with a commitment to public health matters that has been laudably sustained since—and in 2003, the couple selected Ashok Alexander to lead an HIV prevention effort backed by a $200 million gift.
A Stranger Truth is Alexander’s journey from the moneyed world of McKinsey & Company, the American consulting firm, into the India of poverty, scorn and injustice suffered by sex workers of every gender.
Alexander is perceptive and iconoclastic. He writes, in insights that will surprise the many well-off Indians, who seem unaware that ordinary Indians muster heroism every day to survive a lifetime of blows: “These women stand out for the capacity to judge character and negotiate well. They survive because of their personal courage, charisma and sense of humour. They are selfless. They exercise leadership in the highest sense of the word, and with a combination of attributes I have rarely seen in business leaders.” For such deep insights, Alexander deserves praise and readers.
He deserves praise, too, for marshalling evidence that rebukes the destructive campaign of disinformation on Indian sex work conditions led by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, feminist Gloria Steinem, journalist Ruchira Gupta and a motley crew of far-right US legislators and evangelical zealots, who heatedly insist that sex work is indistinguishable from sex trafficking and that the only acceptable solution is to abolish sex work, irrespective of the views of sex workers themselves or the considered advice of the United Nations’ human rights experts.
“The brothels of India are the slave plantations of the 21st century,” Kristof pronounced in his trademark sensationalistic take on brutish Third World nations, stridently adding, “India probably has more modern slaves than any country in the world. It has millions of women and girls in its brothels, often held captive for their first few years.” In truth, as Alexander points out, only a tiny fraction—currently estimated at below one in 10—of India’s sex workers ever work in brothels.
Gupta, who has long been Kristof’s and Steinem’s interlocutor on this subject, equally absurdly claims in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that, in India, “the average age for beginning sex work is between nine and 10”. Such stunning disregard for evidence and truth is only possible where the exaggeraters know they are unlikely to ever be held to account.
While A Stranger Truth deserves to be widely read, it is a strangely uneven book. The quality of Alexander’s writing deteriorates after the first hundred-odd pages, to the point that it almost seems the work of another writer. The analysis deteriorates too, with the early insights giving way to reverential anecdotes about the Gates clan and needlessly exaggerated claims about the Gates-funded HIVprevention effort.
The gravest weakness is Alexander’s neglect of the far-reaching efforts by India’s sex workers to fight for their rights since the early 1990s, endeavours that testify to the strength of grassroots democracy. Readers of
A Stranger Truth would never know that India’s sex workers do not merely display the individual leadership qualities that Alexander rightly celebrates, but also have for decades led pan-India movements demanding a cogent agenda of rights, a cornerstone of which is the decriminalisation of consensual sex work. My hope is that Alexander’s ahistorical ‘great man leading the poor’ account will be the impetus for more readers to turn to Nalini Jameela’s truly revelatory autobiography of life as a sex worker or the other recent accounts that document how India’s sex workers have actually won progress.
Alexander marshals evidence against the disinformation campaign on Indian sex-work conditions by those who insist that sex work is indistinguishable from sex trafficking