Controversial AIDS ads yet to be taken down

Social workers and women's representatives may have got the controversial campaign on AIDS withdrawn on paper, but the posters continue to be seen along main roads and the messages heard on various radio stations.

"We plan to withdraw this campaign and begin a new phase on January 27 when the Balbir Pasha campaign will start looking at the positive side of AIDS awareness," Dr Shilpa Merchant, national HIV and AIDS coordinator, Population International Services (PSI), an NGO engaged in the social marketing of condoms, told Gulf News.

In its campaign, the PSI named an imaginary character as Balbir Pasha who has all the wrong ideas about how AIDS is spread, and even went on to name a commercial sex worker Manjula. This created a flutter among social workers who termed it anti-woman and a misinformation campaign.

With complaints from the Mumbai Grahak Panchayat (Mumbai Consumer Council), various NGOs and People's Health Organisation (PHO), the state Women's Commission headed by Nirmala Samant Prabhavalkar, asked the PSI to withdraw the campaign on January 14.

Prabhavalkar said the commission gave a hearing to the PSI and found the campaign to be anti-woman. A second notice has been given to withdraw the campaign by January 22 but the PSI has set its own date for withdrawing the ads.

According to Dr Merchant of PSI, the campaign was a success and "had to be withdrawn due to the ridiculous views of a small section of people. Since the ads were targeted at men, there were several inquiries and many voluntarily came for testing and others for information on AIDS.

"The common excuse was that they had gone to a sex worker under the influence of alcohol or believed that going to a healthy-looking woman or to the same woman kept them safe from AIDS."

Though the ads were often a cause of embarrassment – when seen at bus stops, traffic junctions or heard on popular radio stations – many thought that it hit the nail on the head.

However, Dr I.S. Gilada of PHO said the slang that is used in red light areas is being used in public violating all norms of decency. This could have been stopped earlier "if the lackadaisical state machinery had acted after the Home Minister gave an assurance in the state legislative council on December 21, 2002 in Nagpur that the campaign would be banned".

The plush Balbir Pasha campaign with advertisements on billboards, in print and the electronic media continues unabated in spite of poor content and "bad taste" for over two months, he said.

"It lacks sensitivity, and though projected to be an AIDS awareness effort, has contributed to denigrating the status of women; making it seem as if all healthy-looking women are available for relations with men like Balbir Pasha."

According to him, the PSI, which is an American corporate NGO, is marketing condoms and making sure through "its misinformation that even married couples have no option but to use condoms.

This is like the way hepatitis-B vaccination was promoted so that even school children were compelled to take it when it was meant only for those exposed to the infection".