Our civilisation has always witnessed a restructuring of discourse through the lens of a powerful, privileged society that doesn’t develop a sensitive and robust mechanism to bring equality and justice for those seeking their rights. Instead, it compensates them by bestowing some divine status.
Today we celebrate the international day for the “persons with disabilities” category with tweets from the government addressing the section as Divyangs.
If we unravel the term Divyang, it opens up a history of marginalisation and brute othering of sections that don’t belong to the power structure. It unknots the shrewd process of divinising marginalised sections and bestowing words like Devis and Divyangs to compensate for the historically persistent act of exclusion.
‘Characters with disabilities are highly underrepresented in video games, and even when they come to occupy a space, they are used as mere props.’ writes @nipunmalhotra https://t.co/AQBIfaTcFS #WorldDisabilityDay
— Youth Ki Awaaz (@YouthKiAwaaz) December 3, 2019
The discourse of divinity becomes the justification for the powerful class to ignore the grievances of these sections brazenly. The crafty malicious intent to subject a section to harassment comes with catchy traditional terms Devis and Divyangs — one to be worshipped rather than brought up to justice and equality.
In the popular imagination, it is gradually established that these sections can’t be harassed and subjected to inequality and injustice as they are divine figures and no longer people with certain fundamental rights.
So we are a country where women are hailed as Devis in the popular imagination and crimes against them are committed daily; where a person with a disability is hailed as Divyang and are ignored their rights ruthlessly by authorities.
Right from the Gandhian approach of devising terms like “Harijan” to mitigate issues of caste brutality and the modern construction of terms like Divyangs, we see a callous insensitivity of the state to hide its consistent failure.
It is high time that governments understand that celebrating a day for spreading awareness in masses for a section of society should start with a better epistemological approach and use of terms that address them politically as citizens of a democratic country, not as any god or godmen.