<B>By Deepa BHOOKHUN</B>

Some two years ago, a friend of mine was getting ready to marry a foreigner. It was then that I became aware that, to do so, the prospective groom had to go through a medical test to prove, among other things, that the person was clear of HIV-Aids.

Surprisingly, my usual tendency to rebel against what might be termed as ?discriminations? didn?t flare up. We both had the opposite reaction. ?Feels good, doesn?t it, that the State is in actual fact protecting you against HIV??, my friend said to me. I readily agreed.

More interestingly, the prospective groom ? an Indian national ? didn?t take offence. And said that, in his country along with discussions on dowry, was the officious requirement that a medical certificate attesting that the person was free of HIV-Aids, be produced. ?It is only fair,? he added. My thoughts exactly.

Now for ?humane? reasons, Government says it is ready to amend the laws so that there are no contradictions with the HIV Act regarding discrimination towards HIV-positive people. We haven?t been told exactly what those amendments will entail and this makes me very queasy. Will this mean that because we cannot ?discriminate?, no foreigner who come to this country will be subjected to a medical test?

Will this mean that any HIV-positive foreign national - who will be entitled to Mauritian nationality because we cannot be seen to ?discriminate?, can we now? - will also become a burden on our dwindling public finances (money, yours and mine) because hey, if they become Mauritian nationals, they get free medical care, don?t they?

I am very sorry if you think I sound mean and heartless but, if you think this, then you need to think again. Because clearly nobody in Government is doing any of the thinking. It took an extra-parliamentary member of the opposition, lawyer Anil Gayan, to remind us that Government has a duty to protect public health.

This duty, I?m afraid is bigger than the duty not to stigmatise and discriminate against HIV-positive people. Because if we don?t discriminate against those people unfortunate enough to have caught the disease, then we will be discriminating against the rest of us.

The Prime minister once said, quoting Stanley Baldwin, that ?power without responsibility is the prerogative of the harlot.? He is damn right on this one. Except that it doesn?t only apply to journalists.