Hoodwinking the handicapped

For fifty years the ruling politicians and administrators ignored these constitutional principles and framed budgets that ensured a contrary development. The keepers were so happy to have become the keepers that even their fascination for human rights or public interest litigation did not ensure national nutrition, health care, motherhood and childhood that would prevent disability. Instead, a laissez faire legal business market priced out the majority from the protection of the legal system and judge-run legal aid copied the economic patronage system of the market place.

Since our founding fathers had not envisioned the conversion by the able of the constitutional principles into vehicles of disability, they did not specifically put disability into the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution as an entitlement to basic rights. The founding fathers thought that they were doing legal engineering against historical discriminations of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth and social or economic backwardness. Thus the fundamental rights of equality, reservation in public services and non-discriminatory admission to state-funded educational institutions did not mention physical or mental disability specifically.

Consequently, last week at a workshop in Delhi University, those made disabled despite the Constitution demanded disability as a specific ground for entitlement to fundamental rights.

But such declarations seem to be fleeting comfort. The Supreme Court8217;s own judgments on specific fundamental rights against bonded labour and schemes in favour of rickshaw pullers have remained unimplemented over the past 20 years or so. Its judgments on clean air and water or on child labour are devoid of a holistic approach that will ensure meaningful implementation.

Worse, there seems to be a retreat to procedures rather than substance, to effects rather than causes. A civil or criminal procedure code approach in a constitutional court invites phantom legislation like the 1995 Disabilities Act that seem to give even as it actually takes away.

The Act states what disability means and then puts scientific figures and facts on each kind of disability. But it says that a disabled person is entitled to the benefits under the Act only if he suffers 40 per cent of any kind of disability and this 40 per cent is certified by a medical authority.

While enacting this law the able forgot that the precise problem with the disabled is the inability to reach any authority, medical or otherwise.

Since the disabled cannot find who the relevant medical authority is, and then cannot reach that authority, they are automatically cut off from any of the benefits under the Act. The bureaucracy of Chief Commissioner and Commissioners for the disabled has not been made responsible for ensuring that the medical authority goes to the disabled. The Act does not have a word on the right of the disabled to be informed about the Act or the names, address and phone numbers of those meant to safeguard their rights under it.

Legal Aid has no programme for them just as the Supreme Court has no national programme to make courts architecturally, traffic-wise, economically and legally accessible. How long will the able ignore that by sheer numbers the disabled are India8217;s future?

The disabled question a Constitution that treats them in the state list of legislative subjects as persons entitled only to 8220;relief8221; along with the 8220;unemployable8221;. They question a Constitution that does not make it a fundamental duty of every citizen to renounce practices derogatory to the disabled. They want an Election Commission that will help them obtain a political voice in representative government. How long will the able blind themselves to the sea of the disabled? But can the able, who have enough worries about their own interests, think and care for the disabled with or without the law?