Right to access.

AFTER years of litigation, redrafts and deliberations with the relevant stakeholders and bureaucracy, Punjab finally enacted the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities Act in December 2022.

This did not come easy, though. In 2017, my friend (advocate Ali Chughtai) and I reunited at a well-known eatery in Lahore. The experience would have been great, but for the fact that I just about avoided falling down the stairs that led up to the restaurant.

Multiple people lifting a quadriplegic wheelchair user in her heavy automated chair up the stairs was not the answer.

I was demanding my basic right of accessing buildings safely. We tried to coordinate with the Lahore Development Authority but they did not take us seriously at that time. We were constrained to file a petition before the Lahore High Court in 2018, merely seeking the judges' help in ensuring safe access for wheelchair users.

Shut up and pose on your wheelchair? No thank you.

The petition, unfortunately, accomplished little, and the matter ended up with generic directions, without any tangible results. I was on the verge of giving up. Acting in a cynical and sluggish bureaucratic manner, the system had effectively deprived me of the right that I was demanding on behalf of a marginalised community. It is all too familiar a tale. I even wrote a piece lamenting how I was now, along with other wheelchair users, at the mercy of the development authorities who had yet to evolve a conscience. In my mind, I knew that it would never happen.

I felt that my activism was mere optics - it appealed to others so long as they were not forced to step out of their comfort zones. Morbidly, it reminded me of an American news anchor ridiculing an African-American basketball star for civil rights advocacy, telling him to 'shut up and dribble'. I was effectively told to shut up and pose in my wheelchair.

I did not shut up though. Ali and I lodged a high court petition in May 2021, seeking a more comprehensive enforcement of disability rights. This time, the matter was fixed before a judge who not only had a conscience, but was willing to do something about the issue - the honourable Justice Jawad Hasan.

His Lordship was appalled at my plight, and immediately summoned the development authorities to submit a compliance report of their accessibility regulations. They immediately formed committees to overhaul the public accessibility of people with disabilities (PWDs) within Lahore, and we started seeing...