Why does the accusing finger always turn towards the oppressed?

In response, IAS officer Smita Sabharwal tweeted, “…does an Airline hire a pilot with disability? Or would you trust a surgeon with a disability. The nature of the #AIS ( IAS/IPS/IFoS) is field-work, long taxing hours, listening first hand to people’s grievances-which requires physical fitness. Why does this premier service need this Quota in the first place!" If you imagined a museum of tweets, this one would make it for being a platonic ideal of ableism. All manner of folks have responded to this tweet with sincerity, wit, varying levels of outrage and the intention to educate.

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I am rather interested in this tweet for being an example of another kind of argument. It goes this way. Say X category of person has reserved seats in education or employment to help reduce the effects of being a member of a marginalised community. And say the person P gains a job in this context and is later revealed to be not an X category person but in fact, a member of Y category, a community that has a history of having advantages over X or even a history of having actively oppressed X. P is revealed to have essentially stolen a share of the small portion of worldly gains (money, power, representation) protected from the greedy hands of their community. In this case, to whom should we direct our bitching and moaning? The person who committed the fraud with their sense of entitlement from being a member of their community that has/had advantages, yes? Apparently not!

In case after case, I am sure you have noticed, the accusing finger turns at the speed of a rich teenager driving at night towards the marginalised community. For instance, if you ever hear that a savarna has taken advantage of India’s hard-won reservation policy by pretending to be from an oppressed caste, the “jokes" that immediately arise are about the oppressed caste. In the case of Khedkar, shouldn’t shame be radiating from the idea of a civil servant without disability perpetuating fraud? Why wouldn’t you at this moment look around with discomfort and ask what chance has allowed you, a mediocre person surrounded by other mediocre persons, to get where you have gotten? Instead, the pivot manifests usually in the form that Sabharwal’s tweet has taken. Of questioning the “merit" of persons with disabilities instead. Or in a similar context, for the state to bury all its violence against avarna students by declaring that the late Rohith Vemula and his brave family “had obtained Scheduled Caste certificates fraudulently".

In Canada, a country with a bloody history of cruelty towards indigenous communities, where as recently as the 20th century, children from indigenous communities were forcibly taken from their parents and placed in terrible “residential schools", there is a popular term for this behaviour. Novelists, filmmakers, professors and others have been alleged to fake indigenous heritage or to have been a “pretendian" aka a pretend Indian. This is a very rude term, as you can imagine, resting as it does on colonial levels of general knowledge. A recent case involved Amira and Nadya Gill, a pair of high-achieving twin sisters. One was an engineering student, the other a law student. They played soccer, ran a podcast, won awards and were proudly indigenous. In September 2023, their mother and they were charged with defrauding organisations that support the education of indigenous students. In June, their mother Karima Manji was sentenced to three years in prison for claiming that her daughters were Inuit by birth and she had adopted them. Charges against the daughters were dropped. In my infinite pettiness, I laughed at the suddenly appropriate term “pretendian". From 1492, when Columbus set sail for India in the wrong direction to 2024—what a long journey.

I think about the pivoting finger often when I read about transphobes in the UK and the US who swear that they are terrified by the idea of “a man pretending to be a woman" coming into a women’s bathroom or “a man pretending to be a woman" competing in women’s sports. I mean, yes, we do need to worry about women’s safety in public spaces or women being impeded in their pursuit of sports or frankly anything. But why is the fear of this “fraud" directed at people who have made complex introspection of their lives and transitioned accordingly? Why is it not directed at, you know, plain old cis men? I have even seen aspiring transphobes in India express similar borrowed panic where we barely have a law that protects cis or trans women and barely a public loo. Why isn’t J.K. Rowling throwing her weight (and billions) into protecting women from men, instead of protecting them from trans women? (Because as the internet proverb goes, “#notallmen but somehow always a man"). Instead the internet is swarming with gross characters best known as transinvestigators, dying to establish with scientific anatomic evidence (aka paparazzi photos) that Scarlett Johansson or some other celebrity is not ‘actually’ a woman. Actually.

I am sure a philosopher like the Australian scholar Kate Mann could make better sense of this pivoting, pointy finger. I get the feeling though that when fraud like the kind we are hearing of gets revealed, instead of it being seen as a fraud on the marginalised community, the oppressor community sees it as a revelation that they have been cheated and not just in this instance. They have been cheated all along. Because for privileged communities and persons, all Audis ought to be their Audis.

Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories. She posts @chasingiamb.

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