Alpana Banerji's first shock this year was learning that she was pregnant. She is already a mother of four. The second was testing HIV-positive. She was advised to have an abortion. Her third shock came last month at the Medical College and Hospital in Calcutta, where the doctors and nurses shunned her, forcing Mrs Banerji to abort the fetus herself.
'The nurses put me in a corner of the ward and the doctor left some abortion pills by my bed,' Mrs Banerji later told social workers. 'When I started bleeding, the nurses ignored me. I wanted to die, but I thought of my children. When the fetus started coming out, I mustered my courage and dragged it out myself.' She cleaned herself up and the nurses told her to leave.
For India's 5.7 million HIV-positive people, Mrs Banerji's story is not shocking, it is common. HIV-positive Indians are routinely denied jobs, accommodation and medical treatment.
Despite having overtaken South Africa in having the largest number of people living with the deadly virus [UNAids figures show that South Africa has 5.5 million infected people], Indian ignorance about Aids remains phenomenal. Nor is it confined to any particular stratum - it stretches right across the board, from truck drivers and peasants to students and the medical fraternity.
Judging by a recent survey of 250 MPs by the Indian Association of Parliamentarians on Population and Development, the ignorance goes right to the top. Two-thirds of the country's policy-makers said they thought the virus could be caught from sharing clothes with an infected person. A third said that sharing food and utensils could spread the virus.
'I'm not shocked,' said Anjali Gopalan, executive director of the Naz Foundation India, an anti-Aids group. 'I come across this kind of thing all the time, even among educated Indians. And MPs are the people who are meant to be leading the way and educating public opinion.'
The MPs' responses revealed the slow progress India has made since the early 1990s, when Aids conferences would open with an official on a stage ostentatiously shaking hands with an Aids victim, just to show that 'touching' was safe.
