Ableism is a great equaliser. From business class cabins to begging rings on streets and traffic signals, it manages to discriminate against persons with disabilities. The only difference is that it still allows the rich to shout to be heard, while the poor are rendered voiceless owing to the lack of vocabulary, capital and, sometimes, even consciousness.
Recently, Vir Das, a stand-up comedian, took to X, narrating how his wife, recovering from a fracture, faced a great deal of inconvenience during her flight to Delhi. Despite pre-booking the ‘Pranaam service’ and a wheelchair with Air India, and paying a sum of Rs 50,000 per seat, they found a broken table, a broken leg rest, and a seat that would not straighten. On landing, they found a step ladder instead of an aerobridge. The cabin crew and airline staff cold-shouldered Das’s plea for help. Finally, Das himself found a wheelchair and helped his wife navigate through the baggage area up till the parking lot.
In 2022, a haunting story broke from Kanpur. Suresh Manjhi, a migrant worker from Bihar, had moved to Kanpur in search of a job. Under the false pretext of providing him with a job opportunity, he was taken hostage. Thereafter, his captor cut his leg and fingers to disfigure him and injected chemicals to induce blindness. Next, he sold Manjhi to a begging mafia leader in Delhi for a sum of Rs 70,000.
Although, these two events are far removed in terms of class, geography, and visibility, yet they reveal something profoundly unsettling — capitalism’s dual relationship with disability. For the rich, it disregards disability. For the poor, it produces disability literally because pity yields profits.
To understand discrimination, we must turn to Amartya Sen’s capability approach, a theory of justice that moves beyond formal rights or resource distribution and advocates the creation of a social order where people have enough resources to meet their full potential and capabilities. In other words, equality isn’t about giving everyone the same shoe size — it’s about ensuring everyone has the capability to navigate. For instance, a person with locomotive disability may require more ‘support’ like a wheelchair or accessible doorways. But equality does not manifest in accordance with the theories propounded by jurists. In the real world, it is interpreted by lawmakers and the subjects governed by the law. As for interpretation of the ‘support’ required by Persons with Disabilities, the courts and lawmakers think that adjustments in routine systems to enable PWDs to perform on a par with their able-bodied counterparts would be enough. They have reiterated that this forms a part of the golden triangle of Article 14, which guarantees the right to equality, Article 19, which guarantees freedom of expression, and Article 21, which guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. But legal and jurisprudential analysis of disability is largely agnostic to the financial status of persons and class disparities that are integral to the debates on disability.
In this backdrop, Manjhi got the worst of both worlds — a social order that thrives on the suffering of others and a legal order that was agnostic to his class and disability. He was a migrant labourer who did not have access to the vocabulary of rights, to a thriving social media account, to legal institutions. His suffering was invisible. He didn’t even have the potential to speak. In his world, disability is a tool — engineered to extract sympathy from passersby who drop coins out of guilt. This is the philanthropy model of disability where the disabled are not rights-bearing citizens but emotional triggers, meant to be pitied, not empowered. This model is a byproduct of capitalism: it prefers charity over justice because charity doesn’t demand structural change. It creates dependency. It keeps the disabled poor in a state of permanent appeal to the moral conscience of others.
The perceived market share of disabled customers is highly distorted. For instance, Indigo alone flew 13 lakh persons using wheelchairs out of the one crore people it flew in 2023-24. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation imposed hefty fines going up to Rs 30 lakh on airlines for their failure to provide wheelchair support to persons who availed of it. In Das’s case, the potential damage to the public perception due to the neglect of his request for accommodation was humongous. Das’s annual net worth is about Rs 84 crore and he has 7.5 million followers on X alone.
Besides the social capital, he and his wife have the consciousness and the vocabulary to talk about inaccessibility and discrimination. They also have the means to fight a long-drawn legal battle. They have mass support on their side. And yet, they were not heard. Going by the fundamental principle of economics that firms are rational actors and aim for profit maximisation, the only possible explanation behind airlines ignoring the business costs of neglecting disabled passengers is corporate apathy.
In Das’s world, disability is an inconvenience and an interruption to an otherwise seamless experience that was paid for in full but was not delivered fully. This is the consumer model of disability — where access is not a right but a purchasable upgrade and the failure to provide it is treated not as a moral lapse but a customer service error. Here, disability doesn’t provoke pity — it provokes annoyance and embarrassment. The system fails — but it fails politely. The experience of someone like Vir Das should serve as a wake-up call for every disability rights activist and class-conscious observer: if even the likes of Das are not spared indignity, what hope is there for someone like Manjhi?
Amartya Sen’s capability theory tells us that justice must be measured not by how loudly one can shout but by whether one is allowed to speak at all. The stories of Das and Manjhi are different chambers in the same architecture of silence. The former is a padded room where voices are muffled. The latter is a concrete vault from where sound cannot escape. Both are shaped by a legal system that fails to empower and a capitalist logic that is willing to pay for its apathy instead of embracing intrinsic empathy.
Until we move beyond the philanthropy model, dismantle the cost-benefit calculus of accessibility, and build a legal system that centres capability — not formal equality — we will remain in this soundproof world.
Anchal Bhatheja is a research fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and a disability rights lawyer