In August 2022, a week before Independence Day, a man working for a well-reputed news organisation tweeted a picture of a person using crutches at a road crossing. The person wore sunglasses and had a full beard. The tweet was captioned, “Delhi beggars”.
This tweet became viral in the following weeks, which was perhaps the intention of the man who posted it. It received thousands of comments on Twitter, most of them negative and jeering. The person using the crutches became a spectacle, solely existing for the newsman’s need to gain quick popularity in the present age of social media likes.
After some mental gymnastics, I understood the caption “Delhi beggars” was meant as a joke, albeit a pathetic attempt at one. But many twitter users who commented on it seemed to find it instantly funny. Many compared the person using crutches to bearded film actors like Aditya Roy Kapoor and Hrithik Roshan.
Others expressed shock, insisting the person was “disabled but not a beggar”. Perhaps eager to prove them wrong, the newsman posted dashcam footage from his car in which the person using crutches is seen going from vehicle to vehicle, seemingly asking passengers for money. Nonetheless, the overarching sentiment expressed in the Twitter comments was shock and denial: “But he doesn’t look like a beggar.”
Another Twitter user claimed that people who beg in New Delhi own flats and rent them out, and therefore one should never give them a penny. Very few users questioned the real intent of the original tweets – to generate shock and to become viral.
What is perhaps most striking about the original tweets by the newsman is the blatant disregard for the disabled person’s privacy and dignity. The pictures and the videos were captured and posted online without his consent. Even more obvious but hidden in plain sight is the power distance between the two men, one seated comfortably inside his car non-consensually photographing the other, who walks outside in the hot sun, asking strangers for loose change.
In the following weeks, other famous and reputable news publications posted the picture on Facebook with ableist captions. Again, the story received ableist comments and jeering. Reporting such posts proved impossible and the only option Facebook provided to me and others from the disability community was to block the news outlets. However, the posts kept coming from other news outlets, none of which I had subscribed to in the first place.
The ableist language of the original tweet and the ensuing news posts visibilised the attitudes of abled people who believe a person who looks like someone they may know cannot be disabled and be forced to beg. They revealed how closely ableism is intertwined with casteism and classism. By demonising begging, abled people do not realise that begging is one of the means for disabled people to stay alive in a world that does not want them to live. Depending on one another for survival is a fact, and in-dependence is a myth. Nobody is an island.
The bland jokes were nothing but a thin disguise for the fact that abled people live in denial of the imminence of disability. By ignoring and othering disability, they ignore that one day they will face disability and so will most people in their lives. Also, abled people buy into the illusion that they are a majority, while disabled and chronically ill people are a small minority. In the times of a global health crisis, this is troubling.
Irresponsible representation of disability by Indian news outlets has a severely damaging impact on disability rights. There are numerous alternate ways that news outlets could have handled the original Twitter posts. They could have shed light on the violating way in which strangers on the internet objectified the person with the crutches with their abled gaze.
By stripping away the humanity of disabled people, abled people strip away their own humanity. Instead of using disability for laughs and internet fame, what if the media sheds light on the issues faced by the disabled community?
Nalini Sharma has wide interests, from web development and design to working on sexual and reproductive health and rights in Southeast Asia. She is passionate about queer rights and disability justice.