What does Swaraj mean to India’s Disabled Community?: Reflections on The Leaflet’s Independence Day Special Issue

But the swaraj of my—our—dream recognizes no race or religious distinctions. Nor is it to be the monopoly of lettered persons nor yet of moneyed men. Swaraj is to be for all, including the former, but emphatically including the maimed, the blind, the starving toiling millions. 

– Mahatma Gandhi, Young India (May 1, 1930)

AS INDIA CELEBRATED its 80th Independence Day this year, we must ask what freedom or Swaraj may mean for India’s disfranchised communities, such as sexual subalterns, Dalits, and the disabled.  As a disabled legal academic myself, the conception of Swaraj from my vantage of disability holds profound significance. There are several imaginations, interpretations, and aspirations of what freedom may mean to different groups. 

However, in our dominant interpretations of freedom, often articulated from an elitist historiographical standpoint, the marginalized and their understanding of freedom are excluded. Therefore, this Independence Day should be used to reimagine freedom, or Swaraj, through the prism of those excluded from the dominant imaginations of what our freedom may mean. 

Flag Independence and the Question of Testimonial and Hermeneutical Injustices towards the Disabled

The flag independence may not necessarily mean much for those whose lives are often shaped by unfreedoms. This point is significantly felt by persons with disabilities. We are at the margins of India’s constitutional and political imaginations, what I call constitutional borderlands; our concerns remain politically benign for India’s political class, and our rights are seen through the prism of charity and pity. 

In an earlier article for the Indian Express, Dr. Sanjay Jain and I have pointed out the ableist nature of the Indian Constitution, as it places disability along with unemployment, old age, and sickness under Article 41. This semantic order of Article 41 is not innocent, as it exposes the ableist understanding of our constitutional makers. The rejection of the petition of the Deaf and Dumb Society of India by the Constituent Assembly highlights how the Indian Constitution makers did not believe the testimonies and lived experiences of India’s disabled, as they refused to accept the demand of removing forms of discrimination built into existing laws and affirmative actions for the disabled in jobs and education.  Rohit De and Ornit Shani see this episode as one in which disabled persons emerge as ‘constitutional actors’; however, from my vantage point, it’s a story of unfreedom in which we are blocked from meaning-making and from sharing our constitutional aspirations in a newly emerged postcolonial nation.  This episode is a chilling reminder of testimonial injustice against the disabled. Miranda Fricker, who conceptualized ‘testimonial injustice’, defines it as the harm inflicted on a group to discount their credibility. In this form of injustice, harm is committed against a group or an individual in their capacity as a knower. A group or an individual faces a ‘credibility deficit’ due to the prejudice of dominant groups. The disabled definitely attempted to become ‘constitutional actors’ during the formation of the constitution, but they faced prejudice from non-disabled people who were the primary and dominant actors in the constituent assembly. These are not merely ‘constitutional silences.’ In fact, we have not developed a vocabulary to name such unfreedoms of testimonial erasure within our Constitutional vocabulary, as the primary meaning-makers of the Constitution have hitherto been liberal males.