—Simranjeet Kaur, Registered Foreign Lawyer (SRA, England and Wales) with experience in litigation and legal compliance, currently practising in London
On 15 May 2026, India’s Supreme Court produced one of the year’s most viral political jokes, at the expense of its own credibility. During a hearing on the senior advocate designation process, Chief Justice Surya Kant said the following:
“There are already parasites of society who attack the system… There are youngsters like cockroaches, they don’t get any employment, they don’t have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become RTI activists… and they start attacking everyone.”
Within three days, a satirical movement had been set up in response. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), named as a jab at the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, crossed twenty million Instagram followers and overtook the BJP’s official handle of 8.8 million. Within a week, the government had taken it down. This post asks a straightforward constitutional question: when the state silences satire directed at a sitting judge’s own courtroom words, does it violate Article 19(1)(a) of India’s Constitution, and does Section 69A of the Indian IT Act give it any valid legal basis to do so?
THE REMARK AND ITS CLARIFICATION
The words were spoken in open court, on the record, by the country’s most senior judge. That context matters. The Chief Justice (CJ) sits at the top of a judicial system that is supposed to protect every citizen’s fundamental rights under Article 124 of the Constitution. When the person holding that office describes unemployed young people as cockroaches, it is not just a poor choice of words. It tells every court below what kind of citizen deserves protection.
The next day, 16 May, the CJ of India said he had been misquoted and that the remarks were only targeted at people who got jobs using fake degrees. Read the original statement. There is no mention of fake degrees . The cockroach comparison is made about young people who cannot find work. Adding a degree-fraud caveat a day later is not a clarification of what was said. It is a different statement. And notably, the word ‘parasites’; was kept in the clarification too.
This matters constitutionally. The Indian Right to Information Act, a law enacted precisely to give ordinary citizens, including those without jobs or institutional backing, a legal mechanism to demand accountability from the state, was undermined when the Chief Justice described those same citizens as parasites. That is the constitutional link: the RTI Act exists to hold government to account. Article 19 protects free speech. Article 21 protects dignity. The CJ of India’s original words put all three in conflict with his own role.
THE CJP: SATIRE AS PROTECTED SPEECH
A joke, yes. But courts in democracies have long held that political satire, especially satire aimed at those in power, warrants the strongest constitutional protection precisely because it belongs to people who have no other platform. The CJP had no lawyers, no office, no press team. It had a meme page and a Google Form. The membership rules were: be unemployed, be lazy, be online too much, and be able to rant.
Its Meme-ifesto laid out five demands: answers on exam paper leaks, ministerial accountability for failures in education, a real employment policy, an end to being talked down to, and the right to criticize people in power without being compared to pests. These are not radical demands. They are the bare minimum a democracy owes its young people, and a generation that has been let down on all five counts made clear it knew that.
The legal ground here is settled. India’s Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v Union of India (2015) struck down Section 66A of the IT Act because it allowed the government to silence speech that was simply ‘offensive’, or caused ‘annoyance’; The CJP offended the judiciary and mocked the ruling party. Under Shreya Singhal, that is exactly the kind of speech the Constitution protects. The court settled this question ten years ago.
TWENTY MILLION FOLLOWERS: TREND OR CONVICTION?
It is worth asking honestly: did any of this mean anything? Following an account costs nothing. No time, no money, no risk. India has around 390 million Instagram users. Twenty million of them following the CJP within a week is roughly five per cent. That is not nothing, but it is also not a march.
Except that the marches happened too. People took to the streets in Delhi, Rohtak, and across six states that share no common political history or organizational network. They wore cockroach costumes in the May heat. That is not passive scrolling behavior. Beyond that, in a country where showing up at a protest can mean police cases, job loss, or being put on a list, choosing the lower-risk option of following a page online is not apathy. It is a sensible calculation about personal cost. The farmers who marched to Delhi in 2020 were met with water cannons. The CJP founder started receiving death threats within days of the page going live. A young person in Lucknow who hits Follow but stays home may not be disengaged. They may just be looking out for their family.
The clearest sign that the government did not see this as a passing trend is what it actually did. It did not wait. It did not monitor. It suppressed the accounts within six days, before any offline momentum could build. Governments do not use national security law on content they genuinely believe is irrelevant.
THE CRACKDOWN AND SECTION 69A
By 21 May 2026, MeitY (the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, India’s nodal agency for internet regulation and digital policy) had cited ‘national security concerns’; to justify the blocking and removal of the CJP’s social media accounts and website. The CJP’s X account was withheld. The backup account was taken down. The Instagram page was hacked and lost. The website was blocked. The founder began receiving death threats. Eight days from first post to complete removal.
This playbook has been used before. In February 2021, the Indian government ordered Twitter to block around 250 accounts connected to the farmers’ protests, among them The Caravan (an independent Indian investigative magazine known for critical coverage of the government), farm union leaders, and sitting parliamentarians. Jack Dorsey, the then-CEO of Twitter, later said Indian officials threatened to shut down the platform entirely and send police to employees’ homes. In February 2024, MeitY blocked 177 accounts during the second farmers’ march. X said publicly it disagreed with the order but had no practical choice, given the threat of fines and staff imprisonment. The CJP case followed the same sequence, just faster.
Section 69A of the Indian IT Act was the legal tool behind all of this, and its design is the core problem. It allows blocking orders to go out without telling the account holder, without any hearing, and without any meaningful way to challenge the decision. The person affected finds out only when they see a platform notice saying the account has been ‘withheld in India in response to a legal demand’. No reasons given. No appeal available. That structure sits badly alongside Shreya Singhal and against the requirements in Anuradha Bhasin v Union of India (2020), where the Supreme Court said speech restrictions must be necessary, proportionate, and open to judicial scrutiny.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PICTURE
The core of this is not complicated. Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution protects free speech. The list of permitted restrictions in Article 19(2) is exhaustive: sovereignty, state security, public order, decency, morality, contempt of court, defamation, incitement to offence. Satirical commentary on what a judge said in his own courtroom does not fall within any of those categories, however irreverent the tone. The government did not even try to argue it did. It invoked ‘national security’; which in this context is hard to read as anything other than political cover.
There is also Article 21 of the Indian Constitution to think about. ILO and World Bank modelling puts India’s youth unemployment rate at 16 per cent. CMIE data for urban youth aged 20 to 24 puts it between 44 and 45 per cent. When a Chief Justice frames that scale of failure not as a state obligation that has not been met, but as a personality defect that turns young people into parasites, and when the government then removes the platforms those young people used to respond to that characterization, Article 21’s dignity guarantee is not sitting comfortably in the background. It is being directly undermined.
CONCLUSION
Three things need to happen to restore the constitutional framework that the government’s response to the CJP has put under strain. Section 69A of the IT Act needs to be reformed so that blocking orders require prior notice, an independent hearing, and public disclosure of the reasons. The government needs to stop treating satire as disinformation: the CJP published no false information, only mockery, which the Constitution protects. And youth unemployment needs to be treated as a constitutional problem, not a character flaw, because a government that fails its young people and then silences them for pointing that out is not maintaining order. It is avoiding accountability.
The question for Indian constitutionalism is whether the state responds to its frustrated young people with actual reform, or keeps issuing removal orders. History is fairly consistent on which of those two approaches holds.
Suggested citation: Simranjeet Kaur, The Republic of Cockroaches: Judicial Speech, Satirical Dissent, and Digital Censorship in India, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Aug. 4, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/the-republic-of-cockroaches-judicial-speech-satirical-dissent-and-digital-censorship-in-india/