Justice, language and the burden of restraint

The categorisation of certain groups as ‘parasites’ and ‘cockroaches’ by the Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant in open court is unfortunate and worrying. The remarks were made by way of obiter dicta last week in hearings on a case related to a lawyer seeking to be awarded the designation of a senior advocate.

The furore that followed brought an immediate clarification from the CJI that read: “What I had specifically criticised were those who have entered professions like the Bar (legal profession) with the aid of fake and bogus degrees. Similar persons have sneaked into the media, social media, and other noble professions as well, and hence, they are like parasites... it is totally baseless to suggest that I criticised the youth of our nation.”

While we must accept the CJI’s position that he did not criticise the youth of India, as was reported, and that his original remarks targeted a narrow section he feared had fake qualifications, the comments broadly and the choice of words in particular are problematic.

Language reveals thinking and often builds the ground for what might follow. The Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh famously said that every communication bears the signature of the person who put it out. We are like the cloud that produces the rain, he wrote, so that even after the cloud has burst, the rain has a lasting effect as it seeps into the land.

Similarly, Mahatma Gandhi spoke of non-violence in “thought, word, and deed”, recognising that the triad represents parts that are interconnected and together make for the complete human experience. Gandhi thus warned against the use of language that is offensive, even against an evil person.

Seen in this light and by many other standards, the CJI’s remarks and the clarification issued later clearly fall short.

The violence embedded in the words, coupled with the dehumanising nature of the language and its well-recorded history of othering certain sections of society, even though the CJI surely did not intend it to carry any of those meanings, make this a particularly undesirable presentation coming from the highest judicial authority of the nation.

Furthermore, even when the remarks are made in passing, their signalling effect influences the nation’s judicial edifice in complex and unpredictable ways later on.

This is not the first time that the CJI has waded into controversial territory. In January, while dismissing a PIL by domestic worker unions seeking that they be covered by the law on minimum wages, Justice Surya Kant remarked that trade unionism was responsible for stopping industrial growth, that unions resisted reforms and discouraged investments. “How many industrial units in the country have been closed thanks to trade unions?” the CJI was quoted as saying.

Similarly, recent remarks on environmentalists have raised concern. Reports quoted the Supreme Court bench of the CJI and Justice Joymalya Bagchi as saying: “Show us a single project where these environmentalists have said we welcome this,” and “You want to stall everything in the name of the environment... How can the country develop without infrastructure?”

The remarks came in an appeal against the order of the National Green Tribunal (NGT), challenging the environmental clearance for the expansion of the Pipavav port project in Gujarat. The court allowed the petitioners to file a review appeal before the NGT and disposed of the petition.

The perils of othering

The tendency to over-categorise and group citizens under labels is a slippery slope. It leads to the ‘them’ versus ‘us’ divide that silences voices standing up to dominant narratives, oversimplifies complex issues, and ultimately does not serve the cause of justice. Categorising all environmentalists or all trade unions or the youth, positively or negatively, betrays a prejudice that makes it difficult to look at the particularities of the case and the complexities of the situation at hand.

In the classic book The Nature of Prejudice from the 1950s, Gordon Allport wrote that man has a propensity to prejudice. This lies in the “normal and natural tendency to form generalisations, concepts, categories, whose content represents an oversimplification of the world of experience.” There are, of course, rational categories that are close to experience but equally irrational categories “composed wholly of hearsay evidence, emotional projections and fantasy,” Allport wrote.

History records that when these irrational flights of fancy are allowed to take off, terrible results follow. The Nazis called the Jews parasites and worse during the Holocaust; Tutsis, massacred in the 1994 genocide by Hutu forces in Rwanda, were referred to as inyenzi (cockroaches in the local Kinyarwanda language); the Americans called the Vietnamese “dinks, gooks, slopes, slants” during the Vietnam war and the Israelis most recently have used dehumanising language against the Palestinians in furtherance of their genocide in Palestine.

The CJI’s clarification speaks of people with bogus degrees who have “sneaked into the media, social media and other noble professions”. This suggests there is surreptitious activity to avoid detection and cause some harm. The remarks come at a time India is under “the biggest attack on the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed to us by our Constitution,” to quote the Congress party. This is also reflected in the further fall in the country’s World Press Freedom Index ranking for 2026, from 151 to 157.

It may be useful to recall the masterpiece movie and play 12 Angry Men that features 12 jurors in a room to highlight how personal prejudice impedes the cause of justice. Henry Fonda, playing juror number 8 in the movie, notes: “It’s always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And wherever you run into it, prejudice always obscures the truth.”

(The writer is a journalist and faculty member at SPJIMR; Syndicate: The Billion Press)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.