AT A BOOK DISCUSSION recently held at the India International Centre Annexe, New Delhi, lawyers, feminist researchers, academics, and students came together to examine how law, NGOs, and global anti-trafficking regimes govern sex work in India. The occasion was the launch of the book ‘Immoral Traffic’, authored by Vibhuti Ramachandran, Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi and Mumbai, the book interrogates what Ramachandran described as an “excess of legality” produced by the convergence of Indian law and donor-driven global anti-trafficking interventions.
The discussion moved broadly through the book’s ethnographic arc. It started from raid and rescue operations, moved to trial courts and judicial inquiries, and finally to the carceral afterlives of protection in shelter homes.
Raid, rescue, and the excess of law
Opening the discussion, Ramachandran situated the book’s title in the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 (‘ITPA’), India’s post-colonial anti-prostitution law. She underlined that her use of the term “prostitution” was not a normative endorsement but a deliberate engagement with the language of law itself. “The law is not actually concerned with trafficking,” she noted, “it is primarily concerned with prostitution and immorality.”
The book’s ethnography begins with what Ramachandran terms “a tale of two rescues,” a close comparison of police-NGO ‘raid-and-rescue’ operations in Delhi and Meerut. She described observing how women were removed en-masse from brothels without distinctions being drawn between trafficked persons, voluntary sex workers, or those merely caught in the sweep of enforcement. “That moment,” she argued, “inaugurates a series of deeply punitive interventions in the name of protection.” The book tracks what follows. It trails through police stations, magistrates’ courts, and eventually, State-run protective homes that many women described as “worse than prison.”
Sociologist Anuja Agrawal contextualised this analysis within long-standing feminist debates on sex work and trafficking. Praising the book’s refusal to categorise women into neat moral or legal boxes, Agrawal emphasised how it captures the “messiness of governance” at the interface of the State, NGOs, and women in the sex trade. She stressed the importance of thinking in terms of “spaces” rather than fixed locations, complicating ‘rescue-and-raid’-based interventions that otherwise remain anchored to static imaginaries of “red-light area” prostitution.
Agrawal noted that Ramachandran’s book draws on her own work, ‘Chaste Wives and Prostitute Sisters’ (Routledge India, 2007), while discussing the rescue operation in Meerut’s Kabari Bazaar. She observed that Ramachandran uses her ethnography of the Bedia community to signal similarities in caste histories and resistance to State intervention, particularly in how women experience “rescue” as indistinguishable from a ‘police raid’.
Courts, testimony, and the moralisation of evidence
The discussion then turned to the courtroom, engaging closely with chapters such as “These Girls Never Give Statements” and “Proving Prostitution”. Professor of Legal Practice at the Jindal Global Law School, Shruti Pandey examined Ramachandran’s account of victim-witness testimony, which asks a question frequently posed by police and prosecutors. Why do rescued women so rarely testify?
Through detailed court observations, the book shows that convictions under the ITPA seldom hinge on victims’ statements. Pandey noted that when women do testify, like Sunaina Das, one exceptional case documented in the book, success is often attributed to NGO support and judicial sensitisation. Yet Ramachandran’s analysis complicates this narrative. It highlights the woman’s own resolve and unsettles the dominant image of the “trafficked woman" as a passive, infantilised victim, exposing the limits of a “criminal-justice-centric anti-trafficking strategy”.
Researcher Saie Shetye, who works with the Migration and Asylum Project and conducted parallel court observations with Ramachandran in Mumbai, elaborated on how special anti-trafficking courts achieve high conviction rates despite the near-absence of victim testimony. She described routine evidentiary practices such as reliance on police-constructed evidence like marked currency notes, decoy customers, and panch witnesses, as well as descriptions of women as “half-naked”, that collapse morality, sexuality, and legality into a single inferential frame. “Prostitution is inferred,” she explained, “from the female body itself.”
Shelter homes, care, and carceral feminism
The inquiry process that follows rescue, examined in the chapter “She Is Not Revealing Anything,” was taken up by political scientist Deepti Priya Mehrotra. She described magistrates’ inquiries as spaces saturated with suspicion, where women are compelled to narrate themselves either as genuine victims or as liars. Autonomy, she noted, is never an option. “There are only two futures on offer. You either return to the family or are confined in a protective home.” Both, she noted, “are forms of custody.”
The discussion culminated in an engagement with the book’s chapter on shelter detention, “From ‘House of Horrors’ to ‘Sensitive’ Governance”. Mahua Bandyopadhyay, Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, located protective homes within a broader carceral landscape, arguing that confinement is not a failure of care but its governing logic. “Women are detained not because they have committed crimes,” she said, “but because the State presumes their incapacity to make sexual and economic choices.” Drawing on abolitionist theory, she warned that rescue-based confinement reproduces ‘social death’ rather than protection.
Across the discussion, a common thread that emerged was the need to rethink anti-trafficking interventions that privilege rescue, prosecution, and rehabilitation while marginalising women’s own assessments of risk, labour, and survival. Ramachandran concluded by clarifying that the book is not an ethnography of sex work per se, but of the existing law and how its convergence with sex work produces new harms in the name of protection.
‘Immoral Traffic: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India’ (2025) by Vibhuti Ramachandran is published by Cambridge University Press and is available online and in bookstores.
