The Homo Sacer : sex work and the politics of legal abandonment in postcolonial India

India’s legal framework for sex work occupies a persistent paradox: sex work itself is not illegal, yet the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA, 1986) criminalises virtually every activity that sustains it. This article argues that this paradox is not legislative inconsistency but structural logic – one that reproduces, in postcolonial form, the colonial dispensation of moral surveillance and spatial exclusion. Drawing on Agamben’s concept of the sovereign ban, it contends that the ITPA produces sex workers as Homo Sacer : included within the legal order through their systematic exclusion from its protections. A qualitative survey of fifty sex workers across five urban sites in North India – Delhi NCR, Chandigarh and Zirakpur (Punjab), Baddi (Himachal Pradesh) and Noida (Uttar Pradesh) – found that 52 per cent entered sex work voluntarily, 82 per cent had experienced police harassment and 76 per cent did not perceive themselves as victims. These findings challenge the victim/criminal binary embedded in both the ITPA and the abolitionist feminist discourse that sustains it. The article critiques the Indian feminist mainstream’s construction of sex workers as trafficking victims, traces continuities between colonial suppression legislation and the contemporary legal framework, and calls for decriminalisation, labour recognition and sex worker-centred policymaking.