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India should take greater meaning from the country’s stellar performance at the Paralympics
By Shahid Judge
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.
Fun fact of the week: The Paris Paralympics came to an end on Sunday with India finishing 18th in the medal tally with 29 medals including seven gold, nine silver and 13 bronze medals. Seventeen of those medals came in track and field, just two less than the entire Indian contingent managed at Tokyo 2020.
The Paris Paralympics saw India win their first medals in track events with Preethi Pal winning two bronze medals in women’s 100m and 200m T35. Deepthi Jeevanji in women’s 400m T20 and Simran Sharma in women’s 200m T12 also won a bronze medal apiece.
Paris also marked the end of Cuban sprinter Omara Durand’s glittering career. The visually impaired athlete completed an incredible triple-triple when she won gold medals in the women’s T12 100m, 200m and 400m events for a third straight edition of the Paralympics. Durand had won gold in all three events at Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 and had also won gold in the 100m and 400m events at London 2012.
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