Law, NGOs, and the afterlives of ‘rescue’: What Vibhuti Ramachandran’s new book reveals about ‘prostitution’ governance in India
The launch and discussion of ‘Immoral Traffic’ focused on Ramachandran’s ethnographic research on women’s encounters with law across raids, courts, and shelter homes.
Ajitesh Singh
Published on: 27 December 2025, 01:47 pm
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.
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.
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.
