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.
The brutal lathi charge and use of pellet guns by the Delhi Police and RAF personnel have resulted in temporary and permanent disability among many protestors.
Political participation of the disabled in the shadow of pellet guns
Those who participate in any political movement are aware that spaces for political participation in India are inaccessible. Be it Jantar Mantar or any other protest site in our country are inaccessible places for disabled people. Yet the disabled have reached out to register their political presence in the recent protest movement. Their participation must be seen as a serious political articulation rather than a matter of empathy. But one must also take notice of the ‘fear of disability’ present everywhere in these protests. The brutal lathi charge and use of pellet guns by the Delhi Police and Rapid Action Force (‘RAF’) personnel have resulted in temporary and permanent disability among many protestors. We know how Projectile Action Guns (‘PAGs’), commonly known as pellet guns, have been often used to maim a segment of the population, to keep them in a debilitated situation – production of bodily injury, exhaustion, and precarity. Jasbir Puar underscored that debility is less a property of an individual body. It represents an ongoing injury, depletion, and wearing down of a population produced through social, political, and economic arrangements.
Even though debility is produced through several social, economic, and political arrangements, pellet guns have remained the most visible, terrifying weapon of producing debility. Pellet guns have been used to debilitate the protesting bodies of Kashmiris several times, which Bollywood is already valorizing After using pellet guns against Kashmiris, the State machinery is now confident to use them against protesters in the capital city, Delhi.
For India’s Disability Justice Movement, the question of the use of pellet guns, their use to permanently put a population under the condition of debility and resultant disabilities, must be the core concern.
Disability futures, in whatever way we imagine them, have to confront the regimes of unfreedoms, their impunity, and the diminishing rights discourse. Talila A. Lewis, in her definition of ‘ableism’, locates sites of ableism in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. Sins Invalid, a disability justice movement, in its ten principles of disability justice, has pointed out that ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world ‘invalid’. Disability is a radical vantage point from which to approach the ‘political’. Yet, heavily NGOised India’s disability movement has shown its severe limitation in giving political articulation to India’s disabled.
India’s Disability Justice Movement must go beyond NGOisation, as this blunts the possibility of assertive political articulations by India’s disabled community.
It is important to note that while disabled people have shown courage to articulate their demands in radical ways in the recent student protest, the ‘mainstream’ disability organizations have failed them. Most of them remained conspicuously silent on this protest, police brutality, and the use of pellet guns. National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (‘NPRD’) is the only disability organization so far that has raised the question of police brutality and the use of pellet guns in the recent Cockroach protest.
In an open letter, which was signed by more than three hundred stakeholders from diverse backgrounds and disabilities and released as a press statement on July 23, the NPRD noted:
“We view the use of these weapons with particular alarm because they are known to cause permanent disabilities...Weapons whose foreseeable consequence is permanent disability have no place in the policing of civilian protests.
We also deplore the use of force against persons with disabilities who were participating in the protest. The State needs to be reminded that it has a heightened obligation to ensure the safety, dignity and equal protection of disabled persons under the law and not to subject them to violence while they exercise their constitutional right to peaceful protest.”
It comes as a very sobering lesson for India’s Disability Justice Movement: it must go beyond the NGOisation of the entire movement, as this blunts the possibility of assertive political articulations by India’s disabled community.
What’s in a metaphor: Operation langda, CJP and beyond
Critical Disability Scholar Tom Shakespeare, in his article, ‘Cultural Representation of Disabled People: Dustbin for Disavowal,’ questions the use of disability as a metaphor by movements of dominant non-disabled ableist societies as a symbolic resource where disability often symbolizes ‘evil, moral degradation, and weakness.’ Terms such as ‘crippled democracy’, ‘blind justice’, and ‘political paralysis’ are examples of reinforcing ableist assumptions even when they are used for progressive political purposes. The CJP-led movement is no exception. For example, in response to one of Amish Devgan’s tweets, a news anchor known to be close to the ruling establishment, CJP tweeted from its X handle, “Are you Blind and Deaf to the demand of the youth for Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation?” The use of such metaphors by the movements shows the built-in ableism even within the so-called progressive movements. If the progressive movements are accountable for women, Dalit, and other movements, what prevents them from showing the same accountability to the disability movement?
Progressive movements and the State in its repressive avatar both use disability as a pejorative, as a ‘dustbin of disavowal’. Illustratively, the extra-judicial half-encounters by the Uttar Pradesh Police are named as ‘Operation Langda’. Such naming of police actions, whose constitutionality is suspect, shows that for violent State machinery, disability remains a punishment and stigma.
A disability politics that cannot speak when bodies are being maimed by the State risks becoming an instrument of accommodation rather than justice.
Conclusion
The disabled who entered the streets have already unsettled the dominant imagination of disability as passivity. They have asserted themselves as political subjects in a movement that has yet to fully reckon with disability. That courage stands in stark contrast to the silence of much of India’s mainstream disability sector, which has refused to confront police brutality, the use of pellet guns, and the production of debility. A disability politics that cannot speak when bodies are being maimed by the State risks becoming an instrument of accommodation rather than justice. If the cockroach movement is serious about democratizing political space, it must refrain from using disability as a ‘dustbin of disavowal’. Disability cannot remain the movement’s pejorative metaphor, nor the State’s punishment. It must become a site from which the meaning of democracy itself is reimagined.