BANGALORE: When disabled Hindu worshippers in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu were blocked from entering temples with their wheelchairs and crutches, Meenakshi Balasubramanian knew she had the law on her side.
The disabled rights activist, who herself has polio, sued the temple authorities in the state’s high court, and won.
Today, she said, temples must provide wheelchairs to disabled visitors if they ban them from bringing in their own medical equipment on the basis the devices are ritually impure.
“I do feel it’s our right, a religious right, a fundamental right,” Balasubramanian said. “We need to be allowed to worship the way we want to.”
Tired of waiting for the government to safeguard their rights to pray, work, learn and travel, India’s 22 million disabled people are increasingly turning to the courts.
So far, the strategy has yielded some surprising victories.
In New Delhi, a disability activist forced state-owned Indian Airlines to provide wheelchair lifts at airports in a case that went to the Supreme Court.
And legal action in New Delhi and Mumbai has removed barriers for wheelchair users and the blind at election polling booths across the country.
The activism has called attention to the weak implementation of the country’s 1995 disability act, which requires government job slots, accessibility of public places and free education.
Many of the landmark law’s provisions are not implemented. Activists blame a culture of passivity among disability organisations that survive on government handouts and charity.
“They are now demanding their rights,” said Rajul Padmanabhan, the director of Vidya Sagar, a group based in Chennai. “Cap-in-hand begging is now out.”
While rights groups have made some progress, the law’s failings are easy to spot.
Vasim Khan, a polio victim who lives in India’s technology capital of Bangalore, rides to school on a wooden plank with wheels that he propels by scraping his palms against the ground. Once there, he crawls up 24 steps to reach his classroom.
Vasim, the 10-year-old son of an impoverished tomato seller, has received few of the benefits of the landmark disability act.
While he does get a free education, he has no wheelchair to get him to school or a wheelchair ramp to access the building and his teachers are not trained to teach the disabled.
A quiet child who has difficulty reading and writing, Vasim experiences daily pain.
“It makes my wrists hurt,” he said, holding out hands swollen from the strain of pushing his wooden board to get around.
If India’s disability rights movement has a founder, it may be Javed Abidi, a former journalist who now directs the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People, based in New Delhi.
Abidi’s late-1990s case against Indian Airlines marked a turning point for the disabled movement, touching off dozens of lawsuits across the country.
Abidi, who is wheelchair bound, found trips to the airport were a nightmare.
Unable to access the building because there were no ramps or machines to hoist his wheelchair above the stairs, Abidi had to be carried to the airport door by four untrained cargo loaders in what he said was a frightening and humiliating experience.
In 1998, the Supreme Court decided in his favour in a ruling that helped convince Abidi that taking the initiative could give the disability act some bite.
Since then, he’s led sit-ins outside politicians’ homes, gone on hunger strikes, and published an online newsletter that seeks to embarrass the establishment. An article from a recent issue is entitled, “Born into bondage in ‘Free India’.”
“Earlier, the disabled people and their leadership by and large went to the powers that be with a begging bowl to seek favours,” Abidi said in a telephone interview.
Helping the disabled are established legal centres like the Human Rights Law Network, a New Delhi-based group of lawyers and activists that has helped Abidi and others like him.
Rajive Raturi, the network’s senior officer for disabled issues, said it filed 14 public interest lawsuits on disabled rights issues last year compared to just a handful in past years.
Still, he said, India’s disability movement is in a nascent stage when contrasted with countries like the United States.
It has yet to reach the country’s rural areas, where more than 70 per cent of the disabled live.
Many rural disabled are left to toil in their homes, bed-ridden, without access to basic services.
“Whatever action is happening is only happening in the metro cities,” Raturi said. “In the villages, knowledge about the (disability) act is absolutely minimal.” The momentum in the cities is, however, palpable.
Three years ago, Vidya Sagar, originally a school for children with neurological problems, formed a legal unit that represents disabled people around South India.
Balasubramanian, who led the case against the temple authorities, is the assistant director.
