This article is dedicated to this person who is I guess suffering from cerebral palsy, as far as I can tell. This person has come to the Gen Z protests happening right now in Delhi, India just near the Parliament of India in the National Capital of India.

This person is repeatedly saying that he feels useless because of his disability and his disability has not allowed him to be a productive and useful citizen of this country, hence he is here at the protests at the Jantar Mantar Protest Site to support the cause of the students.

This article clearly tries to explain and understand the suffering of this individual and how disability is seen in Indian caste society.

Here is the link to the Video Interview of the Said person on Instagram :-

Scripture can tell you what a society says about itself; it cannot tell you what a society does to the man begging outside the railway station. If one wants to understand how disability is actually lived in India, the place to look is not the Manusmriti or the Ashtavakra legend but the street corner, the marriage negotiation, the family that keeps a disabled son indoors, and the racket that profits from a maimed child. The gap between scriptural nuance and street-level cruelty is itself the subject worth explaining and, oddly, it is a nineteenth-century German philosopher who never set foot in India, G. W. F. Hegel, who offers one of the sharper frameworks for understanding why that gap exists.

The everyday mentality: charity, not personhood

On the ground, disability in India is rarely treated as a civil-rights issue. It is treated as a private misfortune to be managed through family shame, ritual charity, or removal from public life. A disabled family member is frequently kept out of weddings, hidden from prospective in-laws during caste-endogamous matchmaking, or quietly excluded from inheritance and decision-making, not necessarily out of malice, but because the family absorbs the surrounding society’s discomfort with the disabled body as something to be concealed rather than accommodated. Where scripture allows for a scholarly Ashtavakra or a limbless Jagannath, everyday practice defaults to something much older and cruder: pity mixed with avoidance. Charity is dispensed, a coin, a bowl of rice, but recognition of the disabled person as a rights-bearing equal is not.

This matters because charity and rights are not the same moral relation. Charity requires no restructuring of society; it only requires an occasional, discretionary gesture from someone above to someone below. And in a society still organized, functionally if not legally, around graded hierarchy, that discretionary gesture is exactly what caste logic already trains people to perform toward those “beneath” them.

Where caste and poverty decide the outcome

The single clearest fact about disability in India is that its meaning changes entirely with class and caste. A disabled child born into a wealthy, upper-caste family gets private tutors, imported wheelchairs, corrective surgery abroad, and a life that can look, from the outside, dignified. A disabled child born into poverty, especially into a Dalit or otherwise marginalized family with no land, no savings, and no caste-network of mutual obligation to fall back on, faces a completely different trajectory: the family cannot absorb the cost of one fewer working pair of hands, so the disabled member is often pushed toward the only “productive” role left available on the informal economy’s margins – begging.

This is not incidental. Organised begging rings in Indian cities are documented to specifically prize disabled bodies because disability generates more sympathy and therefore more money per hour on the street. Investigations and reporting over the years, including an Indian television exposé in which doctors were filmed agreeing to amputate limbs for begging syndicates for a fee, describe children being deliberately blinded, scarred, or maimed by traffickers precisely because a visibly disabled beggar earns more than an able-bodied one. In other words: in the space where the state’s welfare architecture and the family’s caste-network both fail, the market itself starts to manufacture disability as a commodity. The disabled body stops being a person to be included and becomes an instrument of extraction first by neglect, then, in the worst cases, quite literally by mutilation.

Hegel’s India, and why it is uncomfortably relevant here

Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and Lectures on the History of Philosophy build toward a single, notorious verdict on India: that “the Orientals”, Hegel’s own term, had not yet arrived at the idea that the human spirit as such is free. In his scheme, freedom develops historically: in the “Oriental” world only one man (the despot) is free and everyone else is merely subject; it is only in the Greek world that some are recognized as free, and only in the modern, post-Reformation West that freedom is grasped as belonging to every individual as such, regardless of birth or station. India, on this reading, never generalized moral obligation across the whole of humanity, it distributed obligation and status through caste, a “natural,” birth-determined hierarchy rather than an ethical order built on the recognition of persons as persons.

What makes this framework worth invoking here, despite its author’s total lack of direct engagement with Indian life is a specific observation Hegel made about Indian moral sentiment. He remarked that Hindus were scrupulous about not treading on an ant, while remaining entirely indifferent to a poor wanderer starving in front of them. Strip away the orientalist packaging, and the underlying claim is a diagnosis of selective compassion: care that is intensely ritualized and rule-bound in one register (purity, non-violence toward certain sacred categories of life) and almost entirely absent in another (unconditional concern for a suffering stranger, especially one outside your own caste and kin obligations). That is close to a precise description of how the disabled beggar is treated on an Indian street today, stepped around, occasionally given a coin as ritual merit-making, but rarely seen as someone whose exclusion is a problem to be solved rather than a fact of nature.

Hegel’s larger claim was that caste substituted for a genuinely universal ethical life (what he called Sittlichkeit): duties in India were fixed by birth into a varna, not chosen or grounded in the recognition of a shared humanity. A person’s claims on you were determined by where they sat in the hierarchy relative to you, not by the fact that they were a person at all. If that is even partly right as a description of everyday moral reflexes rather than of religion or law, it explains a great deal: why a disabled person’s fate depends so heavily on caste and class position rather than on any generalized entitlement to dignity or state protection; why families treat disability as a private shame to manage rather than a shared social responsibility; and why the state’s own accessibility and welfare laws, however progressive on paper, struggle so badly at the level of implementation because implementation requires officials, employers, and neighbours to treat a stranger’s claim as binding, which is exactly the muscle Hegel argued Indian social life had never built.

The liberal detour: politeness as a new form of charity

There is a newer, urban, educated-class response to disability in India that looks like the opposite of caste-society’s indifference but is, on closer inspection, a variant of the same reflex. This is the liberal insistence on correct vocabulary “differently abled,” “specially abled,” the government-promoted Hindi term Divyang (“divine-bodied”), and an entire etiquette of what not to say around a disabled person. It presents itself as progress, and in a narrow sense it is: it replaces open contempt with polite discomfort. But it rarely originates from disabled people themselves, and it rarely comes bundled with any material change to their circumstances. A person can be spoken to with elaborate linguistic care and still be unable to enter the building where the conversation takes place, still be unemployable, still have no wheelchair.
This is charity again, just relocated from the temple steps to the seminar room. Where the older mentality dispensed a coin as ritual merit, the newer one dispenses a euphemism as social merit, a way for the able-bodied speaker to display their own moral refinement rather than a way of changing anything for the person being spoken about. And there is something quietly dehumanizing built into the euphemism itself: calling someone “divine-bodied” or “differently abled” is a way of avoiding the plain fact of impairment, which means avoiding the plain fact of what that person actually needs, ramps, income, assistive devices, employment law that is enforced rather than merely written. You do not need euphemisms for a full human being whose needs you intend to meet; you reach for them, instead, as a substitute for meeting those needs, the linguistic equivalent of Hegel’s Hindu who will not tread on an ant but does nothing for the starving wanderer: an intense, performed sensitivity in one narrow register (words), and near-total absence of concern in the register that would actually cost something (money, infrastructure, redesigned institutions). It treats the disabled person as an occasion for the able-bodied observer’s own display of virtue, which is a subtle way of treating them as less than a full interlocutor, an object of managed sentiment rather than a subject with demands.

Why this produces no inventions

This pattern also explains, better than poverty statistics alone, why India has produced comparatively so little indigenous assistive technology at scale. Invention requires someone to treat the problem as a real engineering and economic problem worth solving for its own sake, the way, in the West, decades of disability-rights litigation, accessibility law with real enforcement teeth, insurance-funded procurement, and a market of paying customers with legal purchasing power together created sustained commercial incentive for wheelchairs, screen readers, prosthetics, and cochlear implants to keep improving. That chain does not exist reliably in India. Charity does not fund an R&D pipeline; it funds one wheelchair for one person at one NGO event, photographed for a donor’s social media. Euphemism does not fund manufacturing scale-up; it funds a press release. Where the underlying social attitude whether expressed as caste-based indifference or liberal-class politeness never treats a disabled person’s needs as a serious, permanent, collective claim on society’s resources, there is no sustained demand signal for engineers, investors, or policymakers to respond to, only sporadic, feel-good gestures. The 3D-printed prosthetics coming out of IIT Delhi or IIT Madras, or devices like the SmartCane, prove Indian engineering talent is entirely capable of this work; what is missing is not capability but a social mentality running underneath both the old caste hierarchy and the newer liberal etiquette that treats disabled citizens as full rights-bearing people whose participation is non-negotiable. That mentality is the precondition every society that has produced a sustained assistive-technology industry had to establish first.

The lived reality of disability in India is decided far more by caste and class position than by anything in the scriptures. Wealth converts disability into a manageable inconvenience; poverty and caste marginalization convert it into vulnerability to exploitation, up to and including deliberate mutilation for profit. Hegel’s account of India offers one useful, if unflattering, diagnostic lens: a society that has historically organized moral obligation around fixed hierarchical position rather than around the recognition of the individual as such will always struggle to protect precisely the people who fall outside every hierarchy’s protective network, the poor, the lower castes, the disabled beggar on the street corner that everyone in a hurry has learned not to really see.