To fight AIDS, Indian ads channel manliness

“What kind of man are you?” It’s not a question that President Bush is likely to receive when he travels to the Indian subcontinent later this week, but it is one that has all of India abuzz.

The question, posed by Breakthrough, a human-rights organization based in New Delhi and New York, is the slogan for a national HIV/AIDS awareness campaign meant to bring attention to the high rates of HIV infection among married Indian women. 

Launched last May, the campaign has jolted the Indian public with an alarming fact: that two million Indian women are currently infected with HIV/AIDS. But the majority of them are not the sex workers often associated with the disease — more than four-fifths of new infections in women result from sex with their husbands or male partners. 

“That’s why we wanted to talk about married women with HIV/AIDS because all these women are getting infected ... by their husbands,” said Mallika Dutt, Breakthrough’s founder.

The TV, radio and print ads, which show the fear of contracting HIV/AIDS from a woman’s perspective, call on men to wear condoms to protect their wives. The campaign has succeeded by working within cultural norms and capitalizing on the male domination of marriages and sexuality in India. 

Second wave
As Bush meets with Indian leaders to discuss the future of Indo-U.S. relations and India’s growing role as an economic powerhouse, AIDS is not on the public agenda. 

But it is strongly in the background. The promise of India’s future is built on its most important asset — its burgeoning, brainy, billion-strong population — and the good health of this workforce over the next decade or so is vital to the nation's success. 

The HIV/AIDS projections for India, though, threaten to send this house of cards tumbling down. India is considered part of a potential “Second Wave” of the AIDS epidemic, one that includes huge nations such as Russia and China — and where AIDS crises could have global implications. 

The situation is considered so important that in 2005, India was one of two countries added to President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

Governments and international organizations are not the only ones expressing concern.

At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a report presented on the business impact of HIV/AIDS found that 25 percent of firms in South and Southeast Asian countries reported that the disease had some effect on their business operations, and 8 percent believe that they have been seriously impacted. Globally, 46 percent of survey respondents expected HIV/AIDS to affect their operations within the next five years.

Currently, India, with 5.1 million HIV-infected people, has the world’s second-highest number of HIV/AIDS infections (behind South Africa). However, that figure, provided by India’s National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) is widely disputed, and critics charge that the actual infection rate is much higher. 

Nation at a crossroads
What is not in question is the potential for the disease to spread to large swaths of the population in the next five to 10 years if it goes unchecked. 

Breakthrough In an effort to curb the spread of AIDS/HIV in India, public service announcements with theme “What Kind of Man Are You?” have been broadcast on TV, radio, and in print.

According to U.S. National Intelligence Council estimates, India could have 20 to 25 million infections by 2010. The World Health Organization predicts that by 2033, HIV/AIDS will account for 17 percent of all deaths and 40 percent of deaths from infectious diseases in India.

And by the country’s own estimates, one-third of new infections are among people between 15 and 25.

Rema Nanda, the Director of Public Health-HIV/AIDS for the American India Foundation, a U.S.-based aid organization, said the social ramifications of such high infection rates could place India on a downward cycle that could take decades to overcome. 

It’s a grim picture the bears a marked resemblance to the social disintegration that is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa. The difference, says Nanda, is that India has yet to reach the same level of crisis while at the same time possessing the resources to pursue a different path, akin to those taken by Brazil and Thailand.

“It’s five million infections. It’s not eight million, it’s not ten million, it’s not twenty million,” stressed Nanda. “We can do this. We have the ability to do this. We just need the will to do it.”

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