Chief Justice of India Surya Kant has put an end to an unpleasant controversy by clarifying remarks that had drawn widespread criticism. The Chief Justice had made certain verbal observations while dismissing a lawyer’s petition seeking designation as a ‘Senior Advocate’. After reports emerged that he had compared unemployed youth to cockroaches, the legal community and the general public reacted strongly. “There are already parasites in society who attack the system, and you want to join hands with them?” was his response to the lawyer who had filed the petition. Expressions such as ‘cockroach’ and ‘parasite’ drew sharp criticism. The Chief Justice later issued a special statement explaining his remarks. He stated that the media had misrepresented his observations and clarified that he had been criticising those who had entered the legal profession with fake degrees. He said he had referred to them as ‘parasites’ because they had infiltrated the legal profession as well as the media and new media sectors. “There are thousands of fraudulent people wearing black robes. I have serious doubts about the genuineness of their law degrees,” he observed.
The explanation he later offered will help reduce the intensity of the anger and the damage that could have been caused to the judiciary. At the same time, the incident has raised certain issues that need to be discussed openly in society. Beyond the jargon, one cannot help but disagree with some of the implications of the Chief Justice’s remarks. It is one thing to suggest that the “parasites in society who attack the system” do so because they are unemployed. It is quite another to imply that those considered good for nothing are “attacking everything by entering the media, social media, and even the RTI movement.” If unemployed people are opposing a system they believe is responsible for their plight, that is not only natural but also justified. We are witnessing firsthand how the system has turned institutions, including the NEET examination, into instruments of exploitation. Criticism has arisen even from within the judiciary itself that the collegium system is designed to ensure that only certain sections gain entry into the higher judiciary. This is certainly not beyond criticism. I wish the Chief Justice had clarified in his explanation that the system itself is not immune from criticism. Moreover, he could also have clarified that he did not intend to undermine the RTI movement and its activists. The court’s observations should not lend impetus to the efforts of the government and the “system” to weaken the RTI Act.
There is particular reason to be critical of terms such as ‘cockroach’ and ‘parasite’. Historically, such words have often been used as triggers for genocide. In the 1930s, the Nazis routinely referred to Jews as ‘rats’, ‘vermin’, and ‘parasites’. This fostered the perception that Jews were subhuman, outside the protection of law and justice, and therefore expendable. It fuelled the Holocaust, in which an estimated six million Jews were murdered. In Rwanda in 1994, the racist media’s use of the term inyenzi (‘cockroach’) against the Tutsi community became a rallying cry for the mass murder of around eight hundred thousand people. In the 1970s, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge intellectuals described sections of the population as ‘parasites’; that too helped pave the way for the genocide in which nearly 1.7 million people were killed. European colonialists enslaved and massacred indigenous peoples across various regions after branding them ‘savages’, ‘uncivilised’, and ‘animals’, thereby excluding them from the realm of humanity. Words have power. The Chief Justice’s ‘cockroach’ remark is not comparable to the examples above, either in context or in intention. At the same time, similar language is increasingly being used to alienate certain sections of the country. Narendra Modi has referred to protesters as ‘Andolan Jeevis’ and ‘parasites’. Amit Shah has spoken of ‘infiltrators’ and ‘termites’ in Bengal. There are many such examples. If only the judiciary, which corrected itself in time, could also correct the ‘system’!