The conception of rehabilitation too remains
This can be done by amen-
unchanged.
Taking cognisance of the increasing
incidence of trafficking in and exploiting of
male children and adolescents tor prostitu-
tion, the scope and coverage of the new Act
has been widened to cover trafficking in
children, minors and adults of both sexes,
rather than just restricting it to women
and girls.
The definition of prostitution has been
amended to mean "sexual abuse and exploi-
tation of persons for commercial purposes1'
This is an improvement over the older nar-
row definition which defined prostitutions
as the act of a female offering her body for
promiscuous sexual intercourse for cash or
kind.
While the SITA had no specific penal pro-
visions for those trafficking in and exploiting
children for prostitution, the PITA takes a
more serious view of child and minor pro-
stitution It has introduced substantial
penalties by way of prison terms and fines
for living off the earnings, procuring, seduc-
ing and detaining of a child or minor for
prostitution Hotels in which children and
minors are being used for prostitution will
have their licences revoked If any person is
found with a child or minor in a brothel,
unless proved otherwise, it will be presumed
that the child or minor was being detained
for prostitution Similarly if a child or minor
on medical examination is found to be sex-
ually abused, unless proved otherwise, it will
be presumed that it was being detained for
prostitution Penal measures for the above
offences have also been dramatically
increased in respect of adults used for
prostitution
Trafficking police officers, unprovided for
under the SITA are now to be appointed
under the PITA to crack down on inter-state
trafficking for prostitution Provisions have
also been made for two women police
officers to accompany the special police
officers and trafficking police officers on
their raids and to interrogate women and
girls removed from brothels In their absence
a female member from a recognised social
welfare organisation is legally authorised to
conduct the interrogations
While marginal changes have been made
with respect to rehabilitation, the basic
orientation of a 'reformative and corrective*
rehabilitation still remains
The PITA, however, is not only a paper
tiger but it continues to be biased against
the prostitute. It still retains section 7(1) and
8(b) of the SITA, penalising a prostitute for
prostitution in a public place and seducing
or soliciting for prostitution Furthermore,
it has a newly introduced provision for
penalising a male prostitute for these
offences, the prescribed prison term being
not less than seven days and not more than
three months, The client is not an offender
under the Act.
It is time that law and society at large,
perceive the prostitute as a human being, a
victim of exploitation and a surviving sub-
ject, rather than an offender. It is therefore
necessary to decriminalise the act of pro-
Economic arid Political Weekly November 7, 1987
situation per se.
together with the police. It must also be em-
ding the PITA to delete sections 7(1) and 8(b) powered to give evidence against racketeers
which criminalise the activities of a pro- in court, combat police harassment of
stitute Decriminalising the act of prostitu- women in prostitution and rescue women
tion per se can help in curbing police and girls wishing to leave prostitution and
harassment of women in prostitution refer them for rehabilitation.
Decriminalisation must be extended to all
Fourthly, the 'reformative and corrective*
categories of prostitutes—independently
onentation of protective homes must
operating, clandestine prostitutes, street-
change. Inmates must be perceived not as
walkers and cage-brothel prostitutes
delinquents and criminals but as human
While the PITA has tried to plug the beings fighting to survive in an exploitative
loophole in the SITA relating to the offence system It is unbelievable that there are only
of a landlord renting his premises for pro- three protective homes under the SITA for
stitution the new provision is grossly inade- the whole of Maharashtra Emergency hve-
quate The PITA place the onus of proof m centres and more short and long stay
on landlords only if a news item reporting homes must be set up for runaways, women
a raid on his premises is published in a leaving home and prostitution
newspaper having circulation in his area ol The rules for protective homes must com-
residence or if the police submit a copy of pulsorily provide for literacy and a range of
their panchanama during the raid to him vocational and occupational training based
However raids are seldom conducted on on woman's aptitude and market value of
brothels and even more seldom reported the job. Training must not reinforce sex role
More often than not, the landlord k n o w s stereotypes Counselling which helps
that his premises is being used for prositu- redefine inmates as surviving human beings
tion as he is either himself the brothel owner must be provided and half-way homes and
or is hand in glove with the brothel manager government subsidised hostels must also
He can therefore still take refuge under the be set up to house inmates discharged
provision that he did not know that his from homes
premises was being used as a brothel The Widespread public education through the
burden of proof that he did not knowingly mass media on the structural roots of pro-
let his premises for prostitution or know that stitution, attitudes to prostitutes and
it was being used for prostitution must per prostitution and the re-definition of sexual
se and in all events rest on the landlord values and male female relationships
Thirdly, it makes little sense to rai>e penal together with education and employment of
measures without making p r o v i s i o n s f o r women and safeguarding of women's in-
strengthening the implementation s t r u c t u r e terests in laws relating to marriage, divorce,
To curb concentration of p o w e i in p o l i c e custody, inheritance, alimony and the like
hands and to strengthen the e f f i c a c y o l l a w , will go a long way in preventing women
a statutorily recognised mandatory c m / e n s falling prey to prostitution and in helping
committee consisting of representatives of rehabilitate those leaving the profession.
women's organisations, social workers and From the long-term point of view, it is
lawyers must be appointed by the stale only the recognition and acknowledgement
government Such a committee must consti of the material and sexist roots of prostitu-
tute a special cell affiliated to the women's tion, coupled with a determined struggle to
wing of the vigilance branch helping women restructure our unjust social system and
in distress and must be empowered to detect, change our male oriented values, that will
report, raid, arrest and follow up prosecution help towards eliminating a patriarchal
and conviction or prostitution racketeers institution like prostitution
DISCUSSION
Ideology for Provincial Propertied Class?
Gail Omvedt
Chetna Galla
K BALAGOPAUs review of T h e Peasant Balagopal writes, "There are four impli-
Movement Today (EPW, September 5-12) cations that would follow immediately
is a sad example of a tendency to condemn from the logic employed unanimously by
the farmers' movement and its ideology all the contributors: (0 that there are no
without a real investigation of what is exploited or poor people in the towns,
going on. There is very little of an in- (ii) that there are n o exploiters in the
dependent peasant movement in Andhra, villages, (iii) that all the 'villagers' have
essentially the same interest and that
and Balagopal's characterisation is based
interest takes its economic expression in
on his reading of a heterogeneous collec-
remunerative prices, and (iv) that the
tion of writings by various sympathisers
of the movement. Our comments are rural-urban divide is absolute and no
based on our experience, mainly in 'villager* has urban interests". But this is
Maharashtra. a construct.
1903
 At the Chandwad women's session of
Shetkari Sanghatana, not only was
women's exploitation declared to be essen-
tially separate (the first real step away
from the one-point programme), but it
was also clearly stated in Shidori—a,
booklet which sold ten thousand copies
that day, to peasants and not to an intel-
lectual audience—that 'Bharat' included
the footpath and slum-dwellers of the
cities, while the 'peasant leaders' of the
villages were part of 'India'. When Sharad
Joshi stated, "I have never said that the
Bharat-India divide was a village-city
one", it surprised many of us who have
come out of a left movement which has
always said that the farmers' movement
said that 'Bharat' = villages, ' I n d i a -
cities. So we went back and checked to see
if there was a change in the presentation
of the movement. Instead we found, at
least in all the printed Marathi booklets
of Sharad Joshi (which were often taken
from talks at mass shibirs of the move-
ment) that 'Bharat' was always defined as
including "refugees from the villages in
the cities", while the elite/rulers of the
villages were classed as part of 'India!
'Bharat versus India* is a populistic phras-
ing, but it is the left and it's intellectuals
who have defined it continuously in over-
simplified terms as village versus city.
Most of the peasants we met and discus-
sed with at, Chandwad and elsewhere
interpreted it in more straight 'class' terms,
the rich versus the poor, the (mainly
urbanised) comfortable middle classes
versus the toilers. Sharad Joshi, and
probably other theorists of the movement,
have never denied that there is inequality
in the villages; they have only argued that
the main exploiters of the peasants are the
urban capitalists and the state, and that
organised industrial workers—not un-
organised workers—share in the profits of
that exploitation.
We may not agree that even skilled and
organised industrial workers are unexploi-
ted, or that they share in the profits of the
exploitation of others. But Marxists do
have to grapple seriously with the problem
posed by the current situation of the large
factory-based industrial working class in
the world in relation to the rest of the toil-
ing classes (the rural and urban informal
sector). In fact, one way of understanding
'Bharat versus India' is as the unorganised
versus the organised sector. Looking at the
situation in terms of income (is this
'vulgar'?) it might be noted that the
Centre for M o n i t o r i n g the Indian
Economy shows that in 1981 the average
annual income per worker in the organi-
sed sector was Rs 10,851; for unorganised
sector agricultural labourers it was
Rs 1,703; for unorganised sector non-
agricultural wage earners it was Rs 4,871;
1926
for peasants it was Rs 3,000 and for self*
employed non-cultivators it was Rs 5,066.
What does this show us? Where, even in
India, is the 'proletariat' which has
'nothing to lose but its chains'?
All Marxists talk of 'class' but often
without much rigour in its analysis. Those
who, like Balagopal, agree that peasants
have surplus extracted from them through
the terms of trade apparently do not think
about what this means in terms of the
class character of the peasantry. Marx
himself did not always see landholding as
the basis for the class definition of the
peasants. In "Class Struggles in France"
he wrote of the French peasantry that
"their exploitation differs only in form
from the exploitation of the industrial
proletariat" and "the smallholding of the
peasant is now only the pretext that allows
the capitalist to draw profits, interest and
rent from the soil, while leaving it to the
tiller of the soil himself to see how he can
extract his wages". Dosen't this have some
significance for analysing rural India
today?
Balagopal's critique of the Gandhian
'historiography* shown in the English
literature on the peasant movement is a
point well taken. But it is too bad he does
not know the Marathi literature, which is
what is relevant for "Sharad Joshi's
followers in Maharashtra". Much of the
presentation here of the 'historiography'
of the peasant movement begins with
tribal anti-imperialist revolts, and it takes
the main predecessor of the movement to
be—not Gandhi, and not the Deccan riots
either—Jotiba Phule's satyashodhak revolt
of the nineteenth century, which expressed
the exploitation of the peasantry both by
brahmanism and imperialism, and took
form as a movement against shetjibhatji
domination.
BalagopaPs movement is against the
state. Who does he see as its allies? Or are
all others, even if they also fight the state,
only counter-revolutionaries? He writes of
Karamchedu that in 1980 when farmers
agitated for higher prices of tobacco two
youth got killed in police firing: "It was
youth of precisely the same tobacco
farmers' families who assaulted the
Madigas en masse in 1985, brutally
murdered six men and raped three girls."
Are "contradictions among the people"
always pleasant? We would like to remind
Balagopal that so many of the working
class men who are brutalised by capitalism
are responsible for beating and murdering
their wives. Still we are urged not to see
them as enemies and we d o not. Should
we not be able to hold the same expecta-
tions of others? Needless to say, con-
tradictions among the people should be
handled in such a way that the most
exploited among them—dalits, women,
etc—will be able to make significant gains.
Economic arid Political Weekly
But isn't it time to think seriously about
how to do this, and how alliances of
popular forces will be built? It seems
Babasaheb Ambedkar was not so senti-
mental on this issue as many 'Marxists'.
He was wary about linguistic states
because he knew they would become
politically dominated by the big 'peasant'
castes (Marathas, Kammas, etc) who were
often the direct opponents of dalits; yet
he supported the Samyukta Maharashtra
movement on the grounds that the left
alliance fighting for it would go on to take
up the cause of the rural poor. He also
put forward the task of fighting casteism
as a central part of such an alliance: isn't
it a fact that even today both the farmers'
movement and Marxist-Leninists are
ambivalent on this?
It is sad that an activist like Balagopal
seems to disdain the involvement of
masses in the Shetkari Sanghatana in
Maharashtra, both in conferences and in
agitations against the state. Were the lakhs
of cotton farmers who participated in
rasta and rail rokos in December and
January, or the three lakhs who gathered
at the September 5 conference at Satana
simply being fooled and misled by a pro-
vincial elite? If leftists want to define
Shetkari Sanghatana as 'rich peasant' in
terms of its leadership, then they should
be able to say something about the struc-
ture of the organisation, about its district
and provincial organisers, about who runs
its training camps, and what kind of pro-
cess is going on. Or shall we make a
characterisation in terms of programme?
Then what about the largest section of
landless in the rural areas, women? At a
Women's Studies conference in Warangal
in 1981, women activists raised the ques-
tion of why party-led kisan sabhas had
not supported the rights of peasant
women to the inheritance of land. There
was very little response. It is still unclear
if the Ryotu Coolie Sangams have taken
any such stand. But Shetkari Sanghatana
has taken a very clear position. Then
where is the 'rich peasant' leadership and
where is the 'proletarian' leadership?
Undoubtedly there are big differences
between Maharashtra, where the Shetkari
Sanghatana is the biggest mass movement
but divorced from political power, and
Andhra, where so many of Balagopal's
colleagues in the peasant movement are
being tortured and killed by a state at least
partly in the hands of a village-based
goonda elite. But Balagopal seems to be
letting his bitterness about the repression
and his concern for the poorest of the
rural poor overcome his ability to analyse
the conditions and movements of the
exploited masses. We had also been prey
to this tendency in the past. It is neither
a revolutionary nor a scientific Marxist
characteristic.
November 7, 1987