Hawking came to India in 2001 and we watched the Archaeological Survey of India go scurrying for makeshift ramps at Red Fort. It stirred our conscience over our insensitivity to the disabled, despite our slogans.
You don’t need Stephen Hawking’s intellect to note the many awful things that could have happened to him if he was born in India. First, all his creativity and genius would have been crushed under the collective weight of the corruption, politicking and skulduggery common at our scientific institutions. Then, even if he somehow survived, his disability would have reduced him to a laughing stock, or perhaps an object of pity. How unfortunate, even the most “sensitive” of us Indians would have said. How awfully unfortunate that someone so talented had to be treated so cruelly by fate. How unfair can the gods be, but such is his karma, pichchle janam ke paap, (sins of the previous birth), and so on.
We have the world’s largest number of people in each of the numerous categories of disabilities, from malnutrition-induced blindness to goitre and from polio to autism to cerebral palsy. Yet we are the most poorly equipped to even make their lives a little less uncomfortable. We do not care. Until a Stephen Hawking comes along and stirs our conscience.
How many of the people you meet, peers, equals, superiors, competitors, friends, enemies, carry a physical disability of some sort? Have you ever had to worry about accommodating a wheel-chaired guest at one of your parties, official functions, business meetings? If we have the largest number of the world’s disabled, how come we happen to see so few of them in real lives?
Is it because our system is so callous, so lacking in elementary facilities which would make relatively normal lives possible for them, that most people with disabilities, even from well-to-do families, are forced to be confined indoors, at best under the care of attendants or families? A family may give a physically challenged person the basic facilities and comforts at home, but what can it do about the toilets in offices, restaurants, railway stations and airports? Or, can it go out and demand that ramps be built for his wheelchair in office blocks?
The normal middle/upper-middle class response is to confine a physically or mentally challenged family member to the home, comfortable, but severely limited in terms of her quality of life. He is fated, not by his disability but our insensitivity, to lead an incomplete, handicapped life.
The result is, and this strengthens our overall lack of sensitivity, that most of the handicapped people we see are the kinds who cannot afford to stay at home. We see them begging at temples, street corners and traffic intersections, collecting minor charities for orphanages in tin boxes.
This creates a very peculiar Indian belief that physical disability is, like goitre or leprosy, a problem of poverty. That such a scourge will only hit those without means. That all disabled (now divyang) people are poor and not “normal” people. That because I and my family have the means this is not something for which we, or our taxes, need to cater for. In short, that physical handicap would somehow forever spare people like us. Then a Hawking challenges all that.
Stephen Hawking was a remarkable success story in two specific ways. First, his own spirit, equanimity, determination and genius whereby he conquered one of the most debilitating conditions possible to stay at the top in his business and continue to draw admiration, awe, even envy. Never pity. Second, it is the triumph of a social system which has ensured that even such disabilities didn’t hamper a man from leading a very fruitful life.
In our country, the insensitive West, with its allegedly collapsing family system, its supposedly non-existent human and spiritual values, is a fashionably smug stereotype. Yet it is the West which has created a most remarkable support structure, awareness and sensitivity to enable people like Hawking to live, and prosper, as equals. Buses, trains, airports, public toilets, even prisons have special facilities for the disabled.
At another level, since Western society has learnt not to laugh at, or pity, disability, it is easier for it to face up to a handicap like any other sickness. Victims and their families are willing to talk about their disabilities without shame or hesitation, unlike in India where even a relatively manageable handicap like incontinence can reduce people to mental wrecks or confine them indoors in embarrassment. It is tough even to buy an elementary aid like special diapers for the incontinent, which is about all they need to lead active lives.
The West didn’t always have this sensitivity. But it learnt and adapted, particularly after large numbers of disabled people returned after World War II. In the US, the awareness strengthened after the Vietnam war. The Vietcong were the masters of the mine-ambush that sent literally thousands of Americans back home minus a limb or more. The nation’s collective guilt on that useless war built a system that is remarkable, in the facilities it offers the disabled but also for sensitivity where people, by and large, go out of their way to help them lead normal lives.
India has had its share of wars, and one still goes on in Kashmir. Yet, with the one remarkable exception — our armed forces — no section of our society, the government or the corporate sector has acquired that sensibility. We appointed at the turn of the millennium our first army commander with artificial legs. The navy then had a pilot with artificial limbs. We rarely see a top bureaucrat, a CEO, or even a scientist in a wheelchair?
In India, unfortunately, the care of the handicapped is seen as something that belongs in the realm of charity and philanthropy. Instead of providing facilities so they can lead normal lives, we contribute to charities that would keep them in ashrams and disabled people’s homes, to feed them, to help them “pass” their time without being a “burden” on the rest of us. If we had our way, we would send them all into confinement in these ashrams and salve our conscience. There is no pressure or lobby for aggressive advocacy to implement legislation that will ensure that swanky new office towers, whether around Bengaluru’s software parks, Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla complex or DLF highrises on the capital’s outskirts are forced to include wheelchair ramps, lifts, railings and specialised toilets.
When a society is so overwhelmingly insensitive, the disabled are no constituency. We can continue to feel sorry for them, coin new slogans. But when a Hawking reaches the Red Fort (as it happened when he did on his 2001 visit), the Archaeological Survey of India goes scurrying for ramps. Then you rather hope that these makeshift devices will survive as long as the monument, and our collective callousness have done yet.