Notes of a Disabled on the Student Protests: What the police crackdown tells us about disability as a political question

THE STUDENT PROTESTS, which used the vocabulary of ‘cockroaches’ and ‘parasites,’ have become a defining movement of our time. Many are calling it, and rightly so, India’s own ‘Gen Z movement’. Any sincere political theorist and observer will take a serious note of it. In doing so, one must acknowledge that, somehow, in the context of the current movement, the category ‘Gen Z’ is used as a somewhat flat category, where contradictions of caste, class, abilities, and disabilities are masked. Masking these contradictions may have served the movement as a strategic move for a short period, but democratic logic dictates that even Gen Z and its political moves must address them.

I want to understand this movement from the vantage point of my disability and its limitations in including India’s disabled people within its fold. This movement provides an entry point to understand the political aspirations of India’s disabled people, a subject that has been understudied and under-theorized.

Disability futures in times of the ‘cockroach’

There are two videos of disabled people that have caught nationwide attention – a young person with hearing and speech disabilities articulating their demands in sign language and a disabled young man on a tricycle explaining why he is attending the protest. The first one underlines an emergent confident constituency of disabled people who are claiming their space in India’s political imagination. The second video is powerful and tragic at the same time. While the person is claiming his political voice through this movement, he also exposes the cruelty of ableism in our society that has made him feel worthless –‘Nalla’ as he says that everyone has called him.

Nalla! – Almost every disabled person has faced this pejorative in this country in different languages. It humiliates the disabled by suggesting that they have a ‘parasitic existence’ over the family and the nation’s resources. It becomes more pronounced when we see this pejorative in the historical context of the cockroach movement. In her column for The Wire, Arundhati Roy made a sharp comment that the Cockroach Janta Party-led (‘CJP’) movement is ‘the progeny of the unholy union between a judge and joke.’ An utterance of Chief Justice of India Suryakant describing India’s unemployed youths as ‘parasites’ and ‘cockroaches’ has taken India by storm. Many commented that such metaphors are often used by authoritarian leaders to dehumanize a segment of the population. But it is equally true that these metaphors are always present in asymmetrical societies. In societies where ableism is valourized, disabled people are often seen and described as ‘parasites’. Brahmanical graded inequality has always stigmatized Dalit bodies as a ‘moral menace’. So what was unique this time? This time, the metaphor was used without a filter, taking the Indian middle class, the class that shapes the dominant common sense in this nation, within its ambit.