Disability and the Neoliberal Indian State: The Perils of Community Participation

Abstract

Purpose – This conceptual chapter explores the effects of neoliberal development practices for people with disabilities in developing countries with special reference to postcolonial India. I examine the governmental strategy that operates through and on communities, analyzing how global political economy tends to localize disability and development responses. Deconstructing the assemblage of neoliberal development practices, this chapter problematizes this development orthodoxy from a disability lens in the context of a disability self-help group (SHG) project in rural south India.

Findings – In promoting government through community, SHG projects not only overlook structural, material, intersectional, and political processes of disablement but also attempt to reconfigure the cultural notions of community and personhood in the interest of market. The case of disability SHGs elucidates how emancipatory pedagogies and frameworks, when depoliticized and co-opted, can have detrimental effects for people with disabilities in the global south. Simultaneously, highlighting the counter politics and disability agency illuminates the modes of disabled people's resistance in the everyday and the institution.

Practical and social implications – Advancing philosophical and practical insights on inclusion, my hope is that this exercise will inform disability scholars, policy makers, educators, and allies of disability rights movements with a critical lens to question and find alternatives to the neoliberal world order.

Originality/value of the chapter – It contributes a Southern epistemological and empirical perspective to disability studies, which is currently dominated by Northern frameworks. It offers a multilayered understanding of rural disability and development in the context of neoliberalism, the knowledge of which is nonexistent.

Citation

Chaudhry, V. (2011), "Disability and the Neoliberal Indian State: The Perils of Community Participation", Carey, A.C. and Scotch, R.K. (Ed.) Disability and Community (Research in Social Science and Disability, Vol. 6), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 265-281. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-3547(2011)0000006014