When a country like ours with enormous religious faith and distinctive ideological beliefs talks about ‘inclusion’, it feels like the proudest ideological decision that was ever made. But then, there arises a question – do we truly believe in this inclusion or are just superficially following western ideology once again? There is no lie in saying that every society needs to work in a systematic order, and India needs to think and work for the ‘integration’ of its society first. Talking about ideologies and making philosophical statements is easy, working for and accepting ground realities is difficult.
It is not the right way to highlight ideologies if you can’t put them into action. Analysing the situation while taking traditions and cultures into account is the only way to work towards the upliftment of the society. Our society has been stratified on many grounds such as caste, gender, class, disability, religion, race etc. And when it comes to ‘inclusion’, it means including all of these, on non-discriminatory grounds, without any prejudice and treating everyone equally.
In a country where we are still struggling with societal barriers, attitudinal barriers and infrastructural barriers, do you think ‘inclusion’ is being exercised? Where integration is yet to be achieved, inclusion will only be a reality on paper. Where disabled people are seen as unproductive and women are seen as liability, what inclusion are we talking about?
Merely mainstreaming the so-called ‘weaker sections’ of the society will not help the nation to become inclusive. Mainstreaming in education and workplaces are just like putting the people with varied abilities in the same box without labelling them, just to give them the tag of equals. This not only snatches the right of being specially-abled, i.e., their individuality, but it also dispels their opportunities. In this way, their identity just gets lost in a crowd of judgement. Therefore, it would not be wrong to say that the hierarchical social structure of our nation curbs the individual growth of every citizen.
Hence, it is said, work for integration first, think of inclusion later.