Gender & disability: Need inclusion at intersections

Hindustan Times

4 days ago

Anchal Bhateja knew she was breaking a barrier as the first blind woman to appear before the Supreme Court in June this year. But, she says, she was 'worried about how I would reach the court. How I would read the annexures, if asked. I needed to memorise the page numbers, in case the judges asked me which page something was on.' Then, she smiles: 'It made the process more adventurous.' At Pride Parade, as a queer woman with disability, Anchal finds herself left out: No volunteers to help, inaccessible, uneven pathways and lack of sign language interpretation. (HT Photo)
Fittingly, her client was a woman with visual disability challenging an ad by the Uttarakhand judicial services. Even though the law stipulates job reservations for people with disability, the ad inexplicably excluded those with visual impairment. 'It was so arbitrary,' says Anchal.
Born with partial vision, Anchal lost her sight entirely just before her Class 10 board exams. No matter. She was able to get a scribe to write her papers. Two years later, when she took the Class 12 boards, she topped her district with 97.2%.
When she arrived at the National Law School, Bengaluru, she recalls, 'Nobody asked if I had special needs.' How on earth was she supposed to find her way from the hostel to the academic block? 'You can't always ask the other students because everybody is in a rush. There were days when I would skip my meals because there was no one to help me find my way to the canteen,' she says.
One in five women globally lives with a disability. Depending on their circumstances as migrants or minorities, Dalit or LBT (lesbian, bisexual and transwomen), these women face multiple challenges.
According to UN Women, women with disability are two to three times more likely than other women to face violence, very often from their own family. They are three times more likely than men with disability to be illiterate; two times less likely to be employed and three times more likely to have unmet health care needs.
Organisations working on disability issues hire twice as many men with disability as women. In 2017, UN Women found that in seven Asia-Pacific countries, institutions for gender equality had no women with disabilities among their membership.
Public spaces are exclusionary; not just footpaths and buildings but also, ironically, spaces meant to be inclusive. At Pride Parade, as a queer woman with disability, Anchal finds herself left out: No volunteers to help, inaccessible, uneven pathways and lack of sign language interpretation.
In the digital space, the websites of 155 organisations such as LinkedIn and key ministries such as civil aviation and labour and employment failed to meet accessibility standards in February this year, and were fined ₹10,000 each by the Commissioner of Persons with Disabilities (CPwD). In June, 95 websites had failed to respond. The fine was increased to ₹50,000.
Perhaps the most poignant problem facing women with disability is loneliness. In the past week, CPwD received two complaints from women with disability. The first is a music teacher with locomotor disability who wants to get married but her family will not help since they depend on her earnings. The second, with visual impairment, fell in love but the man abandoned her after cheating her of a large sum of money.
Like women everywhere, safety is a major concern. How do you trust the taxi driver will get you home safely? On a wing and a prayer, says Anchal, who has founded QAble, a platform for building inclusive ecosystems for queer persons with disabilities in India. 'If my friend is having a birthday party at night, I am going to go,' she says. 'You have to live a full life.'
Namita Bhandare writes on gender. The views expressed are personal.