This article originally appeared in The Field’s newsletter, Game Points, on September 11, 2024. Sign up here to get the newsletter directly delivered to your inbox every week.
In the banquet hall of a Mumbai hotel, Suyash Jadhav found a vacant chair. Before anybody could offer assistance, Jadhav used his elbow to scoop up the seat and carried it to where he had to sit.
A week later, Jadhav travelled to Brazil to compete at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympic Games. A professional swimmer, he had lost both his arms just under the elbow as a child after being electrocuted by a stray wire.
Jadhav was also a part of the 84-member Indian contingent that competed in the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games, from which the country returned with a record haul of 29 medals – seven gold, nine silver and 13 bronze. The tally included 17 medals from athletics alone, along with India’s first gold medal in archery and a first medal in judo.
This was a rather successful campaign. And for India, this was an important campaign.
In most parts of India, social stigma is still attached to disability.
According to a 2019 report by the National Statistics Office, about 2.2% of India’s population has some form of physical or mental disability. That number is well below the approximate 15% figure in other countries.
Some argue that Indians tend to underreport disability, which prevents those individuals from accessing entitlements such as reservations of seats in academic institutions.
That’s just one aspect of how disability is treated. The other, arguably more prominent, is that infrastructure to accommodate people with disability is shockingly scarce. A report in The Times of India stated that most medical institutions in New Delhi do not have wheelchair accessibility.
After Deepthi Jeevanji, who has an intellectual impairment, won bronze in the women’s 400m T20 event at the Paralympics, she recalled that when she was a child, her parents had been urged to give her up to an orphanage or abandon her.
In Paris, Jeevanji showed there is more to her than her disability.
In fact, Paralympians the world over have asserted that their stories aren’t meant to serve as inspiration for able-bodied people. They do not want sympathy. They want to be treated with the same respect as any able-bodied person.
In an interview with The Indian Express, Tokyo Paralympics silver medallist Bhavina Patel said, “There are places where people think, ‘yeh bechare hai.’ [she is helpless] This has to change. Hum bechare nahin hai [we are not helpless].”
The “para” in Paralympics does not stand for paraplegic. “Para” comes from the Greek word for beside or alongside. Essentially, the Paralympics and Olympics exist side-by-side.
And in both cases, it is a competition between the best athletes in the world vying for gold medals for their countries in the most prestigious sporting event.
With those 29 medals, the Indian Paralympians have shown they are a force to be reckoned with in the sporting world.
Limited-time offer: Big stories, small price. Keep independent media alive. Become a Scroll member today!
Our journalism is for everyone. But you can get special privileges by buying an annual Scroll Membership. Sign up today!