Guest Column Sruti Mohapatra

Twenty-four years ago, I met with a road accident. One drunk driver’s callous driving turned many lives upside down for a lifetime. A baby lost her mother, a young girl lost her ability to walk and one elderly woman lost her zest for life, ending up losing her memory completely. Three individuals affected. Three families shattered. And the driver will never know!

That was 1987. I am that young girl. I cannot walk. I need a wheelchair for mobility and an attendant to assist me all the time. In these 24 years, I have seen the definition and perspective of disability changing. But the question that still remains to be fully answered is: “Who is disabled?”

Am I disabled? The answer to this question is, I had never felt disabled until I reached Bhubaneswar from the rehabilitation centre in Vellore in Tamil Nadu Society painstakingly made me aware that I was disabled.

I strongly resisted it having grown up in a family where we were all treated as equals, irrespective of the existing girl/boy divide then. Till my return, I was a wheel-chair bound person, quadriplegic, who was living as near normal a life as possible, but with a slower pace and a different way of doing things. At home I was still the eldest daughter and my opinion was valued.

In other words I did, what I could, what I loved, with a different body form but nothing abnormal. As people started visiting me, my body which was accepted at home as one with different needs suddenly became deformed, pitiable, an experience which shattered my newfound confidence and pushed me into a cocoon of isolation for months.

Society (my marriage broke down) and the government’s attitude (in not allowing me to join my job) hammered into me the label that I am “disabled.” Even now, when I am not just a tax payer and an established name in my state but also an activist for the cause, people pat my head, have tears brimming in their eyes or they are awkward in the use of terms like “walking” in my presence.

I strongly feel the society should not be categorised into what is normal and abnormal or different - after all, who and what determine the parameters? For example, at what stage, should having difficulty in walking or reading a book qualify an individual for a “disabled” status?

Many people are affected by illnesses or accidents that cause temporary impairment at some stage in their lives. Therefore the ability to carry out activities in a variety of different ways should be recognised as being a regular part of everyday living.

The fact that an individual has a disability should not be seen as implying a lack of ability or intellect. It is the environment that imposes the constraints that prevent disabled people from participating fully in day-to-day activities and living their lives fully.

And this environment is the outcome of discriminatory attitudes and ignorance which prevents disabled people being offered the opportunities given to their non-disabled counterparts.

The principle of diversity provides the foundation to accept disability as part of human variation.

However, it is a sad reality that in practice, our treatment of difference has been rather poor, especially in the context of disability.

Legislation and social policies do not generally reflect the full range of diversity of abilities that exist in the society.

The “problem” of disability thus stems from a lack of responsiveness of the state and civil society to the difference that disability represents.

So what is disability? Well, it’s complicated. Disability occurs when health conditions and contextual factors (including affluence, age, gender, societal attitudes, available healthcare and other services, personal motivation, and a host of other factors) interact and converge into loss of function and participation.

Disability is an individualised experience; the same impairment can have entirely different outcomes for two people living in different places. In this sense, there are an infinite number of factors which contribute to the disability experience.

Persons with disabilities (PWDs) face problems with their health, society’s discrimination, inaccessible buildings and transportation.

Solutions must be multifaceted, individualised to an extent, able to address the many faces of disability and to accept it as another situation in the course of day-to-day living, and nothing bizarre.

The transcendent value of social development is the fulfilment of the citizen as a human person, the fruition of national society as a human community and that the human being is the object and subject of development efforts. There can be little development if some sections of the population are in bad health, hungry, physically weak, ignored, oppressed and left out of the mainstream society.

This moral imperative couldn’t be more clearly stated than James Wolfensohn: “If development is about bringing excluded people into society, then disabled people belong in schools, legislatures, at work, on buses, at the theatre and everywhere else that those who aren’t disabled take for granted. Unless disabled people are brought into the development mainstream, it will be impossible to cut poverty in half by 2015 or to give every girl and boy the chance to achieve a primary education by the same date, goals agreed to by more than 180 world leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September, 2000.”

From Albert Einstein, John Milton, Ludwig Van Beethoven to Walt Disney and David Blunkett, all had some disability or the other. Yet, they conquered their limitations to become legends in their own rights.

So who is disabled? One who is limited in physical and mental faculties or one who is limited in vision and thinking and thus does not provide a level playing field to those who are challenged?