Supreme Court’s Samay Raina order: Reflecting on disability justice in the era of precarious liberties
The Court’s directive to the Union government, in the Samay Raina case, to have a guideline to regulate ‘commercial speech’ can have a chilling effect on speech, which is inconvenient for the political establishment. For the disability movement, this is a moment to reflect on the limits of carceral disability justice.
Vijay K. Tiwari
Published on: 8 September 2025, 03:38 pm
‘SUN SUN SUN Didi tere liye ik rishta aaya hai’ is a famous song by Gulzar in the movie ‘Khoobsurat’. In the song, meant to be playful, the younger sister, played by Rekha, chides her elder sister that she has received a marriage proposal, but the groom stammers, the future mother-in-law has hearing difficulties, and the father-in-law has speech difficulties. One might expect Gulzar not to produce a stereotype of disabled people, but even the sensitive poet failed to acknowledge the dignity and sensibility of disabled people.
From ‘Khoobsurat’ to ‘India’s Got Latent’, India’s art community has shown a remarkable lack of understanding of the human dignity of the disabled. Often, it produces a story of ‘inspiration porn’ in the name of celebrating the disabled, or mocks them, robbing them of respect and dignity. There are some profound attempts to make meaningful art and cinema based on disabled experiences, too, but every time disabled people and their experiences are mocked in artistic expression, it is deeply felt as humiliating.
The recent order by the Supreme Court to comedians Samay Raina, Vipul Goyal, Nishant Tanwar, and others to put online apologies for their insensitive remarks has again highlighted the inability of India’s art community to engage with the question of disability. It also has some important constitutional lessons for the disabled community.
From ‘Khoobsurat’ to ‘India’s Got Latent’, India’s art community has shown a remarkable lack of understanding of the human dignity of the disabled.
Academic Tobin Siebers points out that disability is perceived as “an aesthetic of human disqualification.” Perceived as such by the normative majority, the disabled are made caricatures of ridicule. An aesthetic that primarily perceives them as inferior, incapable, and lacking produces an art and discourse that brutally excludes and demeans us. This time, with the India’s Got Latent controversy, the disabled community reacted sharply and angrily.
The reaction hints at the new emerging sociological reality of India’s disabled community. Anuj Bhuwania, in ‘Courting the People’, points out that Public Interest Litigation became a tool for the population who were living at the ‘margins of legality’. The strong subaltern movements of 1970-80, such as Dalit and Feminist movements, were the first ones that used legal routes to ensure their rights and dignity. The disabled community was a late entrant in using the legal tool for securing its rights. Disability scholar Meenu Bhambhani highlights that in the initial phases of the Indian disability movement, the pressing questions of livelihood, daily survival, and rehabilitation occupied most of the resources and imagination of India’s disability movement. Portrayal of disability in art was never a primary consideration of the movement.
