ABSTRACT
Sri Lanka’s response to Covid-19 is embroiled with an imminent constitutional crisis. The Covid-19 outbreak hit Sri Lanka during a period of political turmoil – the national Parliament had been dissolved on 3 March 2020, with elections called on 25 April 2020, six months prior to the official end of the Government’s elected term. As a result, the President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, set out to respond to the public health emergency without democratic Parliamentary oversight. The President imposed an island-wide curfew under the Quarantine Ordinance, and those caught violating the said curfew were arrested. In this chapter, we present the lived experiences of two women with disabilities and the intersectional challenges they have continued to face throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The lived experiences have been used to demonstrate the gendered-disability impacts for ethnically diverse minority women with disabilities, who continue to experience stigma and discrimination because of their race, poverty, and rurality.
