Contemporary legal discourse claims to recognise the disabled body as a bearer of rights, dignity and constitutional personhood. Yet it often betrays a deep discomfort with disability in the language it chooses.One of us is disabled and part of a WhatsApp group comprising lawyers, disability rights activists and disabled academics. The group regularly debates questions of inclusion, access and the future of disability jurisprudence in India. Recently, a leading disability advocate shared the new cause list issued by the current Chief Justice of India. It stated that “cases relating to specially-abled persons” would be given priority hearing.The decision to prioritise such cases was welcomed. Access to timely justice is not a small matter. But the court’s terminology unsettled many of us. The phrase “specially-abled persons” felt jarring. It echoed a patronising vocabulary that disability movements have long resisted.The discomfort was not merely semantic. The Supreme Court had previously released a Handbook Concerning Persons with Disabilities. The handbook explicitly advised against euphemisms such as “specially-abled” and called for the adoption of rights-based, constitutionally grounded language. When the court itself reverts to terminology it has formally disavowed, it raises uncomfortable questions.Within our group, the concern was palpable. Was the handbook a genuine institutional commitment? Or was it an exercise in optics? When progressive language appears in official documents but disappears in everyday judicial practice, the promise of transformation begins to look performative.We take another snippet from a disabled lived experience. At a recent webinar at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, a Supreme Court lawyer was the sole speaker. During the interaction, a disabled alumnus asked a question. The lawyer responded by urging him to use the “correct” term, “specially-abled” instead of “disabled”, to change the narrative around disability.The moment was telling. A disabled person was being corrected on the language of his own life. The power to name disability was being claimed by someone who does not live it.This is not incidental. It reflects how able-bodied actors often control the terms of debate. In doing so, they intrude upon disabled people’s right to meaning-making and meaning-sharing. The choice of the word “disabled” is not accidental. It is political. It locates injustice in social and institutional barriers, not in individual bodies.These lived experiences of disabled lives are characterised by a persistent struggle to uphold their ability to create and uphold a vocabulary that captures their circumstances against counter-forces that obscure their experiences and deny them autonomy.However, these are not isolated events. In fact, a troubling pattern is emerging in our judicial discourse in which it is expected of the disabled individual to perform as a ‘super-crip’ of the able-nationalist variety. Being a super-crip of this variety has become a tacit condition to avail reasonable accommodation from the courts of India, as we shall demonstrate below.The Sujata Bora case and the burden of ‘making the country proud’In a packed courtroom on January 13, the Supreme Court read out its verdict in the case of Sujata Bora v. Coal India Limited & Ors, ending its pronouncement with the exhortation: “Make the country proud of you … and, Coal India proud of you … Do well in life.”The appellant, Sujata Bora, is an individual with disability, suffering from visual disability and residual partial hemiparesis – a neurological condition that causes weakness in one side of the body.The appellant was denied a seat on two separate grounds for the post of management trainee in Coal India despite qualifying for the role: first, that she had only applied under the category of visual disability, whereas she suffered from multiple disabilities (the option for multiple disabilities was unavailable in the form); and second, that that her impairment allegedly fell below the 40% “benchmark” threshold.The Supreme Court found in favour of the appellant, reversing an earlier adverse position taken by the division bench of the Calcutta high court. The Supreme Court based its decision on the grounds that the state had a constitutional and statutory duty to provide reasonable accommodation to allow the appellant to fulfil her duties at work. So far, good.The Supreme Court’s decision in Sujata Bora is part of a long line of judgments such as Ravindra Kumar Dhariwal v. Union of India (2021), Vikash Kumar v. UPSC (2021), Omkar Ramchandra Gond v. Union of India (2024) and Rajive Raturi v. Union of India & Ors. (2025) alongside administrative policies such as setting up of the “Accessibility Committee” at the Supreme Court, and the release of the Handbook Concerning Persons with Disabilities referred to above, that have placed the Supreme Court as a laudatory figure championing disability rights in an otherwise hostile state-society.While these judicial and institutional measures have brought relief to the individual appellants, and other intended beneficiaries, the court’s exhortation above reveals a deeper, troubling trend. It is that the human rights of disabled individuals are being made contingent on their fulfilment of duties and their performing to the standards of the Indian neo-liberal state-society. In this way, their citizenship itself is being made “modular” – broken into abilities or performances.The court’s encouragement to Bora to “make the country proud” is per se not problematic. However, it becomes concerning when placed against the broader trend of including disabled individuals in the fold of citizenry only if they have ability to contribute to the nation’s glory – by being “hardworking” and having “grit and determination”.In cases such as Omkar Ramachandra Gond the Supreme Court listed out middle class disabled individuals as ‘shining sons and daughters’ of India. Such a listing effectively suggests that to be deserving of legal remedy, a disabled person must be “inspiring” and fit the paradigm of the ideal citizen – irrespective of whether their lives and livelihoods are protected. Bora is also rendered one in a long line of “modular disabled citizens” – a curated gallery of “super-crips”.This is the hallmark of able-nationalism – a model of the country and society where the state uses the “inclusion” of certain disabled bodies to project an image of a caring, modern and “developed” nation and its charitable corporations. By telling Bora to “make the country proud”, the court transforms a statutory right into a patriotic obligation.In the landmark case of Vikas Kumar, the Supreme Court similarly framed disabled people as “assets, not liabilities”. As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder aptly explain, this able-nationalist neo-liberal framing requires disabled citizens to be in the service of the nation-state rather than to be ‘parasitic’ on its resources.In the eyes of the court, individuals like Sujata Bora are assets – citizens whose inclusion provides a nationalistic dividend, as evidenced by the court’s discussion on why businesses should invest in disabled individuals. The disabled subject is no longer a rights-holder by virtue of their humanity; they are a national investment expected to yield returns in “grit” and “inspiration”. This narrative erases the millions of disabled Indians who are not, and should not have to be, prodigies to deserve a job or an education.Contrast this with the Supreme Court’s judgments in cases involving disabled political dissenters such as G.N. Saibaba, Stan Swamy or Hem Mishra, who are framed as “problem citizens” as they do not fit into the narrative of able-nationalism, its inclusionism and “modular citizenship”, of being politically benign ‘good’ disabled citizens.These disabled political dissenters find themselves at the ‘constitutional borderland’ as their political dissent goes beyond state-sanctioned limits. They cannot be characterised as an ‘insular and discrete minority’ as they had shown that they had a political voice, which was inconvenient for the state and the court. They did not fit into the nationalist narrative or the court’s paternalism.Rejection of the Handbook on Gender and Persons with Disabilities: an obscurantist turnRead together, these developments expose a deeper problem in judicial discourse. The court’s exhortation in Sujata Bora to “make the country proud” reflects an able-nationalist framing that is ultimately exclusionary. It conditions recognition on productivity, inspiration and national utility, subtly recasting disabled persons as assets rather than unconditional rights-holders.Furthermore, institutional shift from “progressive” handbooks marks a regressive turn that is perhaps best captured in George Orwell’s famous warning: “… that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought”.The Handbook concerning Persons with Disabilities is reduced to a performative exercise. The rejection of the Gender Handbook by the Chief Justice of India as being “too technical”, “too theoretical” and “Harvard-oriented” is not a benign exercise either. These rejections render marginal bodies and their experiences unimportant and invalid. It is undemocratic too, as it valorises essentialist notions of what it means to be “a woman” or “disabled”. This top-down dictate squeezes the democratic space within which vulnerable groups can make sense of their own experience.Vijay K. Tiwari is an assistant professor (law) at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. He is a disabled academician who engages with critical disability studies and disability justice activism.Ishita Ghosh is an assistant professor (law) at the School of Law, RV University, Bengaluru, and serves as the current coordinator for the Centre for Disability Justice and Inclusion at RV University. Her research lies at the intersection of human rights and jurisprudence, with a particular focus on disability justice and reasonable accommodation.