What if ...

Last week, Sachin, a young journalist from Business Standard, contacted Disability Rights Alliance (DRA) to talk to a preferably Person with Disability (PWD) member on how the big hype in the press, over the recent elections being rendered disabled friendly, measured up against the ground reality. Going by Business Standard’s desire to seek their opinion, the advocacy of the rights of PWD by DRA is apparently credible. And I am understandably proud to be a member of DRA, in fact the member who was deputed to talk to Sachin. I enjoyed describing many of the glaring lapses that exposed wilful deceit or inaccuracy in the media’s hype on current levels of disabled-friendliness; classic examples may be found in
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/cover-story/spot-checking-mumbais-disability-friendliness/articleshow/69152762.cms  or in Fifth of polling stations not friendly to disabled, Mumbai TOI April 29 2019 (the lack of disabled-friendliness alluding usually to the booths being on the first or second floors of buildings without elevators)! The make-shift ramps at booths in Chennai visited by members of DRA were so steep that independent use by wheelchair users was quite dangerous and scary. As for availability of disabled-friendly toilets, we are talking about India! (For the ultimate oxymoron, see my blogpost on an upmarket hospital in Chennai without ANY disabled-friendly toilet at https://differentstrokes-vss.blogspot.com/2019/03/my-recurring-nightmare-but-in-real-time.html. After talking to me, on my experience of voting in Chennai last month he wrote a piece (in Business Standard) on how one wheel-chair using mathematician (me) viewed the ground reality of going to vote this year in Chennai. (This had been possible only due to the resourcefulness of my driver!)

More interestingly, as I found out only later, Sachin was asking the pertinent question, of whether making the entire election process more accessible to PWD and thereby more inclusive, might affect the outcome of the election. The simple arithmetic he proposed was to compare typical margins between winning and losing in our elections, with the proportion of the electorate who were PWD and would be able to cast their vote if the electoral process were to be truly barrier-free and accessible. For instance, the typical difference between winning and losing in our elections is about 15%, while about 20% of voters who are PWD will benefit from the entire election process being made barrier-free. I would say this to Sachin: IF every PWD (in fact any person with some sensitivity) were to see a video of PM Modi making `jokes’ of very dubious taste about people afflicted with dyslexia that was (a) on social media a few weeks back, (b) and deleted rather quickly after many people commented on how shameful and in poor taste it was for the PM of `the biggest democracy’ to mock her citizens who were dyslexic, (c) but thankfully not deleted before it was preserved on Twitter (see @RoshanKrRoy) making it possible for anyone who so desired to reload and see the video; THEN it is almost sure that (s)he would decide to vote for anybody but Modi, thereby giving more credibility to Sachin’s conjecture.