How India’s judiciary began to mimic the executive slur
- Pius Fozan
- May 17
- 4 min read
In Narendra Modi’s India, even the courts speak like the government
When Chief Justice Surya Kant casually labelled unemployed youth as “cockroaches” and “parasites” during a Supreme Court hearing, he had every reason to expect total silence.
Over the last fifteen years, India’s press freedom and capacity for social outrage have been systematically hollowed out. The state machinery has routinely bulldozed homes. There is no outrage. Nine million voters in Bengal are deleted from electoral rolls with a bureaucratic keystroke. There is no outrage. The Supreme Court glibly tells disenfranchised citizens they can simply vote “another time”. There is no outrage.
The Chief Justice was probably comfortable expressing his disgust and did not expect a digital counter-rebellion.
The language of institutions rarely changes in isolation. It drifts, sentence by sentence, until what was mostly attributed to the political speech of the ruling party begins to appear in courts that were designed to stand apart from it. In recent years in India, that drift has become more visible in the overlap between executive rhetoric, judicial commentary, and the broader moral framing of dissent.
It is a sorry fact that such language and its perception, has become thinkable within the institutional space of the highest court. That alone signals a change in the rhetorical ecosystem of authority. It is here that the overlap with executive speech becomes difficult to ignore.
The political vocabulary of the present government has, over time, repeatedly framed protest and dissent through moralised labels: “andolan jeevi”, “urban Naxals”, “anti-national elements”, among others. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the term “parasites” was also used in public discourse by political figures to describe segments of the protesting population.
These framings do two things. First, they narrow the interpretive space available to dissent and compress ideological and political disagreement into security-oriented categories. So, it is now normal to impose terrorism and threat to national security charges on people the government does not like. Now, this compression has taken hold and any dissent is pre-emptively classified as performative, parasitic, and anti-national.
Another instance of alignment between judiciary and executive rhetoric is the acquittal of Anurag Thakur. Then a senior minister, Anurag Thakur chanted “desh ke gaddaron ko… (shoot the traitors)” at an election rally in the context of protests against the new changes in citizenship laws. Fifty-three people died in the tragic Delhi riots, of which 36 were Muslims and 15 were Hindus. Umar Khalid has been in jail for five years without trial, and Thakur is acquitted of any charges of hate speech.
Umar Khalid has been in jail for five years without trial, and Thakur is acquitted of any charges of hate speech.
Each of these episodes is a convergence in how dissent is linguistically described by institutions and how all three organs of state are aligning. That is dangerous.
The burden of unemployment and the moralisation of worklessness
The CJI’s framing moves the blame onto young individuals. He appears to suggest that unemployed youth turn to “attacking the system” simply because they fail to secure a profession. This viewpoint consciously disregards how state policy determines structural opportunity.
The State of Working India report shows there are 367 million young people (15-29 years). in the country. They would be the envy of any ambitious economy, yet 263 million of them are outside the university system and left completely unskilled for the modern economy.
Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data highlights overall unemployment at 3.1% in 2025 and 5.2% in April 2026, but the unemployment rate in 15–29 years age group sits at 9.9% (in 2025). For urban youth, that number is 13.6%.
Educated graduates face the steepest joblessness due to systemic skill mismatches and a decline in higher education quality.
For young people in poorer states like Bihar completing a bachelor’s degree can take more than 5 years compared to 3 years in rest of the country. This chronic gridlock severely disadvantages young people.
The historical trajectory since the pandemic shows youth unemployment numbers regularly hovering in the mid-teens to over 20%. Another evidence is manufacturing’s share of GDP which remains sluggish.
Blaming individuals for failing to secure a livelihood in this economic climate is the modern equivalent of Marie Antoinette telling the starving to eat cake.
The state controls investment incentives, labour market flexibility, and education standards. When the economic engine sputters, responsibility cannot be outsourced to the victims.
Unemployment is intrinsically a policy outcome and not a behavioural and moral one. The Chief Justice forgets that. He relocated the responsibility and made it a moral question.
Like uncles and aunties of our collectivist society, like the Prime Minister himself, everyone wants young people to be more “adaptive”, more “entrepreneurial”, more “skilled”, more “resilient”. But no one cares to build a support system for it. Instead, these wordings collectively substitute for questions about accountability, state capacity, recruitment cycles, and the uneven distribution of opportunity.
The Chief Justice appears to suggest that the role of the state is secondary, and the citizens are not entitled to economic inclusion. Instead, citizens have failed to convert opportunity that is assumed to already exist.
Separation of powers or echo chambers?
The lines separating the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary are blurring. Checks and balances require deliberate, institutional distance. What we are witnessing is a terrifying alignment of legal metaphors (“cockroaches”), executive labels (“andolan jeevi”), and state censorship mechanisms. We saw it plain as day when the CJI’s bench blacklisted three academics and weaponised criminal contempt proceedings over a simple Class 8 NCERT chapter on judicial corruption.
The judiciary derives its final, unelected authority from public trust. Dehumanising unemployed citizens erodes that legitimacy far quicker than a bad policy verdict. The Supreme Court cannot be seen mimicking the executive worldview. And silencing the platforms young people build to protest will not fix the broken economic choices that forced them to organise in the first place.
