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Author	Dr Vijay Kishor Tiwari
Organisation/Institution	The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata
Country	INDIA
Panel	Constitutional and Admin Law
Title	Mapping the Social Contract of the Disabled Citizen Within the Oeuvre of Indian Constitution: A Crip Reading of Ableist Nature of the Indian Constitutional Discourse
Abstract	Martha Nussbaum pointed out that the prevailing liberal theories of social justice exclude persons with disabilities, the world citizens as these theories take the nation-state as the basic unit and non-humans. The social contract of the disabled citizens with Indian Republic, too, starts with testimonial erasure and hermeneutical marginalization of the disabled community in which the disabled were seen as ‘outliers’. Disabled did not have any participation in the Constituent Assembly of India, and that resulted in the marginalization of constitutional demands of the disabled . This puts the social contract between the disabled citizenry and the Indian Constitution in a unique position where the disabled get precarious citizenship dependent upon affirmative actions and favorable court judgments. In recent years, the Indian Supreme Court has made several judgments that have enabled the rights of disabled citizens. However, this paper argues that these positive judgments and contemporary constitutional discourse on the rights of disabled citizens are not without their flip sides. Primarily projecting the disabled community as an ‘insular and discrete minority,’ the court gives a modular form of neo-liberal citizenship that a disabled citizen must take to receive inclusion and accessibility. The paper argues that this modular form of neo-liberal citizenship that defines disabled citizens in the language of the neo-liberal market as “assets, not liabilities" in the case of Vikas Kumar v UPSC excludes disabled citizens such as GN Saibaba and Stan Swamy, who asserted their political agency to register their political dissent. This inclusionism of disabled citizens has not challenged the ingrained ableism and able-nationalism. It offered a neo-liberal form of modular citizenship to disabled citizens designed by the liberal legalism of Indian Courts, which have a limited utility in achieving disability justice in a fuller sense that is aligned with the rights of other minorities and the rule of law in general. The paper finally makes an argument that a democratic crip reading of the Indian constitution should take the debility of other minorities into account.
Biography	Vijay is currently an assistant law professor at The West Bengal University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), Kolkata. Jurisprudence, Third-world and Feminist approaches to International Law, International Human Rights Law, and Critical Disability Studies are his areas of expertise, with a special interest in disability studies and TWAIL. He has done his Ph.D. from NLSIU, Bangalore. ‘Incredulity towards Eurocentric metanarratives' informs his research, and he is interested in subjugated epistemologies and alternative epistemes centering decentered voices and embodiments. As a person with Disability, he is also engaged in Disability rights activism.