Gandhi's Uneven Politics of Disability

We remember Gandhi as a symbol of morality and service to the marginalised. However, disability rarely figures in that remembrance. Yet, his addresses contain a scattered but revealing set of reflections on physical incapacity, leprosy, begging, mental illness and citizenship.

It would be misleading to see it as a coherent Gandhian theory of disability. But they show how questions of bodily difference were being thought of in nationalist politics, sometimes as questions of work and dependence, sometimes as questions of participation, and sometimes as questions of stigma and social contempt.

In his interview with a missionary nurse published in Harijan in May 1935, while discussing poverty, begging and the obligation to work, Gandhi objected to the indiscriminate encouragement of begging and argued that a person seeking food should be offered work, where possible. For those who could not work due to their physical condition, he asserted that they “have got to be supported by the State”.

Therefore, in his own distinction between those who could work and those who could not, he did not leave the responsibility to support the latter only to family, charities or religious institutions. Physical incapacity remained a responsibility of the State.

In a conversation with Benjamin Mays in 1937, Gandhi argues in a different direction. There, he compared an army of violence with a non-violent movement. While the former made particular physical demands, the latter was far more inclusive.

This comparison is pertinent. It implies that incapacity is not determined by bodily conditions alone. It also depends on the kind of activity that a society chooses to organise. A form of collective action designed around force and military discipline might be exclusionary; a movement organised differently, on the other hand, can widen participation. Therefore, the question is not only what a person can do, but what institutions demand of them. Exclusion is placed in ordinary institutional arrangements.

However, Gandhi did not place incapacity as a central task of the nationalist agenda. In 1940, in response to the question whether providing daily meals to disabled beggars should be part of the routine work of a constructive worker, he described such service as valuable, but declined to place it within the Congress Constructive Programme. According to him, that programme was confined to activities that he considered as indispensable to the achievement of swaraj. Assistance to disabled persons belonged instead to “social service in the widest sense”.

This is where Gandhi’s concern also stopped short. The disabled remained recipients of assistance rather than participants whose inclusion might reshape that programme itself.

This tension is visible again in Gandhi's remarks on citizenship during his speech at a prayer meeting in Panchgaon in 1947. While supporting a broad adult franchise, he said that he would exclude ‘lunatics and loafers’. Therefore, he saw perceived mental incapacity as a reason for withholding political membership.

In relation to this, Gandhi had a very different opinion on leprosy. He argued that persons affected by leprosy had been made fearful and politically silent by the social treatment. They had received neither appropriate education nor respect. He suggested that, if properly educated, they could become “ideal citizens”.

These two remarks should not be read as a comparison between leprosy and mental incapacity. Their relevance is narrower. Gandhi did not treat persons affected by leprosy as inherently incapable of citizenship. He located an important part of their marginalisation in social neglect, fear and inadequate education. By contrast, the persons he described as ‘lunatics’ were treated as presumptively outside the franchise. The passage reveals the uneven and differentiated way in which Gandhi connected bodily or mental condition to political membership.

Later that year, Gandhi addressed the stigma attached to leprosy more directly. He challenged the social contempt attached to leprosy. He rejected the idea that people suffering from leprosy were uniquely sinful and objected to the social degradation carried by the word “leper”.

Responding to T.N. Jagadisan, himself a person affected by leprosy and engaged in service work, Gandhi endorsed a language that identified people as persons affected by a condition rather than as the condition itself. Therefore, society had to get rid of the “leprosy of contempt”.

This is perhaps the most enduring element in Gandhi's scattered reflections. He distinguished bodily condition from the fear, naming and contempt through which a person might be made socially inferior. The injustice attached to leprosy did not arise only from illness; it also arose from the way others treated those affected by it.

Two simplified readings of Gandhi should therefore be resisted. We should not see him as an early advocate of a fully developed politics of disability inclusion. The evidence does not support that claim. We should also resist discarding his language of work and incapacity as nothing more than paternalism and exclusion. That too would be incorrect. Gandhi connected physical incapacity with an obligation of state support, suggested that social organisation affects participation and identified stigma as a distinct form of injury.

It is often tempting to search Gandhi's writings for an anticipation of today's language of rights, accessibility and inclusion. That might be misleading. His remarks on disability were partial, inconsistent and sometimes troubling. But they still force us to confront questions that remain unresolved: when should support be treated as a public responsibility, how do social arrangements decide participation, and how does contempt become part of the disadvantage attached to an impairment?

Anuj Goyal is assistant professor at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi.

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