“For twenty years, we must stop this brain from functioning.”– An Italian prosecutor while asking for 20 years of prison sentence for Antonio Gramsci“As far as terrorist activities are concerned, the brain plays a very important role…A brain for such activities is very dangerous.” – Supreme Court on G.N. Saibaba’s plea for house arrest after prolonged incarceration There was an ominous similarity between the incarceration of Antonio Gramsci and G.N. Saibaba. Both were inconvenient and disabled intellectuals for the regimes of their times. Mussolini called Gramsci the “Sardinian hunchback and professor of economics and philosophy”. The spectre of such brutality came to India during the unusual Saturday hearing of the Supreme Court to suspend the Bombay high court’s order to release the 90%-disabled G.N. Saibaba on bail after a long incarceration. In that infamous Saturday hearing, the bench of Justice M.R. Shah and Bela Trivedi uttered the above-mentioned quip, which, I am sure, will go down in history as one of the most violent utterances of the court while failing to protect the liberties of a disabled professor. Gramsci faced the charges of undermining the Italian state. Saibaba faced the charges of treason and Maoist activities. Gramsci died at the age of 46, succumbing to death in prison prior to his release. Saibaba too succumbed to death just after a few months of his release. The incarceration of Gramsci and Saibaba that resulted in their deteriorating health condition and eventual deaths are reminders that liberal accommodationist solutions should be seen from the gaze of incredulity, as it often fails to protect dissenting disabled bodies. Within this context, I would like to discuss the limits of liberal interventions to ensure reasonable accommodation in prison. Incredulity towards accommodationist solutions in prison“I am a pessimist because of intelligence, but I am an optimist because of will,” Gramsci had said.Recent judicial engagement with the question of disability rights in prisons, most prominently the Supreme Court’s decision in Sathyan Naravoor v. Union of India (2025), has been projected as evidence of a more humane turn in India’s criminal justice system. Extending the normative framework articulated earlier in L. Muruganantham v. State of Tamil Nadu (2025), the court mandated that all states and Union Territories ensure “reasonable accommodation” for incarcerated persons with disabilities. These directions encompass accessible prison infrastructure, appropriate medical treatment, assistive technologies, and functional grievance redressal mechanisms. At a doctrinal level, such interventions reiterate the principle that incarceration does not extinguish constitutional guarantees under Articles 14 and 21.However, the significance of these developments cannot be assessed solely through the lens of incremental reform. They demand a more searching political and ethical inquiry into the very nature of incarceration. The central issue is not whether prisons can be modified to become marginally more inclusive, but whether the institution of imprisonment, particularly in a contemporary climate marked by the expanding criminalisation of dissent, can ever be aligned with the values of justice, dignity, and equality.This sceptical position is powerfully articulated in the scholarship of Simone Rowe and Leanne Dowse, who argue that penal abolitionism and critical disability studies, despite overlapping concerns, have largely developed in isolation from one another. Both traditions interrogate social injustice, institutional harm, and systemic marginalisation, yet their analytical and political trajectories rarely intersect. Their critique is particularly pertinent in the Indian context, where individuals with physical, cognitive, and psychosocial disabilities are disproportionately incarcerated, frequently as undertrials subjected to extended detention without adjudication of guilt.Rowe and Dowse highlight that while both abolitionist thought and critical disability scholarship challenge carceral institutions, they tend to do so along parallel tracks. Penal abolitionism offers a fundamental critique of prisons as mechanisms that entrench inequality, legitimise state violence, and fail to address the social conditions that produce harm. It calls for non-carceral, transformative responses grounded in care and social justice. Critical disability studies, on the other hand, rejects individualised and medicalised understandings of disability, emphasising instead how institutions – including prisons – actively generate disablement through regimes of surveillance, exclusion, and neglect.Despite these shared commitments, legal and policy-oriented disability discourse often limits itself to questions of access and accommodation within existing institutional frameworks. At the same time, abolitionist critiques do not always foreground ableism as a structural dimension of punishment. This disconnect creates space for reformist solutions to dominate, privileging improvements in conditions of confinement while leaving the foundational logic of incarceration unchallenged.Accommodation as legitimation and containment: Political dissent and carceral discourseThe judicial emphasis on reasonable accommodation within prisons, as seen in Sathyan Naravoor and Muruganantham, exemplifies the limits of such reformism. While these measures may reduce immediate hardship for some prisoners, they also risk recasting imprisonment as a setting compatible with dignity and rights. The provision of ramps, wheelchairs, or medical protocols does not fundamentally disrupt the reality that prisons are designed to discipline, confine, and control.In India, this concern is intensified by the routine use of preventive detention and expansive security legislation such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). The normalisation of prolonged undertrial detention has rendered the process itself punitive, irrespective of eventual conviction. Within this context, accommodation functions less as an enforceable entitlement and more as a contingent allowance, shaped by administrative discretion, security narratives, and political calculations. Both Gramsci and Saibaba had, what Ashis Nandy calls, ‘the untamed language of dissent’ whose dissent flouted the ‘common sense’ and consensus of the middle class of their political society. They were inconvenient disabled for their governments, who refused containment and hence, denied humane treatment. Accommodation in prisons is never politically neutral. Disabled prisoners perceived as politically non-threatening may receive limited concessions. Those associated with dissent are often denied even the most basic care.The case of Father Stan Swamy exemplifies this dynamic. An 84-year-old Adivasi rights activist suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Swamy was arrested under the UAPA in the Bhima Koregaon case. Despite repeated applications highlighting his medical condition and seeking bail or basic accommodations, he was denied effective relief. Requests for appropriate medical care and assistive aids were met with bureaucratic delay. He died in judicial custody in 2021 without ever being convicted.Swamy’s death cannot be dismissed as an aberration. It revealed how disability rights collapse when they confront the imperatives of national security and political repression. In such cases, disability does not mitigate punishment; it intensifies vulnerability. The process itself becomes punitive.Why reform is not enough: Towards a democratic alternativeThe standard response to such injustices has been a familiar repertoire of reforms: revised prison manuals, sensitisation workshops, accessibility audits, and periodic assurances of compliance. These measures may offer some immediate and uneven relief, but they stop well short of questioning the prison itself as an institution built on domination and control. Historically, reform has rarely dismantled oppressive systems; instead, it has often helped stabilise them, making incarceration more administratively efficient and politically defensible. If disability justice is to mean anything beyond symbolism, it must be integral to abolitionist politics. An abolitionism that overlooks ableism risks reproducing the very exclusions it seeks to challenge, just as a disability politics restricted to accommodation risks legitimising the carceral state.A democratic society that claims a commitment to equality cannot continue to treat imprisonment as the default response to social conflict, or political opposition. Such a commitment requires a decisive shift in priorities: towards public healthcare, community-based mental health support, social security, and non-carceral forms of accountability. For disabled people – particularly those with psychosocial and cognitive disabilities – justice lies not in marginally improved prison conditions, but in the refusal of confinement as a governing response.The cases of G.N. Saibaba and Father Stan Swamy bring this reality into sharp focus. Their incarceration and deaths in custody lay bare the hollowness of rights-based claims when severed from a political critique of punishment itself. Justice cannot be delivered by institutions that systematically erode dignity, especially when those subjected to their power are precisely those who challenge it.And so…The liberal accommodationist solutions within prisons are insufficient. The disability justice movement of India should be acutely aware of the limits of reformist approaches and underscore the need for structural change.Cases such as Sathyan Naravoor, Muruganantham and the incarceration of Father Stan Swamy and G.N. Saibaba reveal the contradictions of a system that speaks the language of dignity while practising exclusion. The fight for reasonable accommodation in prisons is great, but we need to understand its limitations too. The task before democratic forces is not to make prisons more accessible, but to question their legitimacy and work towards their abolition. Only then can the struggle for disability rights move beyond accommodation and towards genuine social transformation.PostscriptDavid Forgacs, in his paper, ‘Gramsci Undisabled,’ discusses how Gramsci’s image, which was most commonly used by Communist Party branches all over Italy from 1940s to the last decade of the 20th century, erased any sign of Gramsci’s disability. The ‘approved image’ of Gramsci did not take into account the disability of Gramsci, which was central to his personal and political philosophy. Gramsci’s birth anniversary today should be used to remind readers of this fact. Vijay K. Tiwari is an assistant professor (law) at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. A version of this article was published in the Peoples Democracy, focusing on a critique of liberal solutions of prison reform for disabled prisoners.