—Eklavya Vasudev, postdoctoral researcher, Cluster of Excellence “Transforming Human Rights” at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
On 15 May 2026, sitting alongside Justice Bagchi, the Chief Justice of India described a category of citizens from the bench. Young people who are unemployed, he said, turn to journalism, social media, Right to Information (RTI) activism, and other forms of civic engagement. He called them “parasites” and “youngsters like cockroaches” who attack the system. The remarks came during the dismissal of a lawyer’s petition concerning senior advocate designation (a mark of distinction conferred by the Court) broadly akin to the status of Queen’s Counsel in the United Kingdom.
One might file this as a lapse of judicial temperament, regrettable but not significant. That reading is too comfortable. The remarks are worth dwelling on not just because of their rudeness but because of their contextual incoherence. The institution that spoke these remarks spent five decades constructing, through Indian constitutional law, the precise category of citizen it now derides. The Supreme Court of India built a watchdog citizenry, deliberately as an instrument of its own constitutional project. To now call those citizens parasites risks disowning its own authorship.
The larger point is not unique to India. Any apex court that judicially constructs the mechanisms of its own accountability faces a structural hazard: it can hold its creations in one of two postures. On the first, which I will call the constitutive posture, the watchdog citizen is part of the constitutional order itself, owed engagement as of right because the order does not function without that scrutiny. On the second, the proprietary posture, the same citizen is the beneficiary of a discretion the Court exercised and may withdraw, tolerated rather than owed. The drift from the first to the second is quieter, not necessarily announced in a judgment, and easy to miss until a sentence from the bench makes it audible.
What the Indian Court built
The Indian Court’s role as architect rather than passive interpreter is visible across three doctrinal lines.
The first is the right to information. Prior to any statute, the Supreme Court located a right to know in Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, the guarantee of free expression. In State of Uttar Pradesh v Raj Narain (1975), Justice Mathew held that in a system of responsible government the people have a right to know every public act of their public functionaries. S.P. Gupta v Union of India (1981) extended this to the conduct of state institutions, treating open government as a direct emanation of the right to know. The line ran through the disclosure cases on electoral candidates and culminated, as recently as the 2024 Electoral Bonds judgment, in the Court recognising an inherent constitutional value in the citizen’s informed participation. The Right to Information Act of 2005 was Parliament catching up with a right the judiciary had already announced.
The second is Public Interest Litigation (PIL), a judicial invention and a self-conscious one. In S.P. Gupta and the cases around it, the Court dismantled the traditional rule of standing, holding that any member of the public acting in good faith could move the Court on behalf of those too poor or disabled to do so themselves. An inflexible insistence on standing, Justice Bhagwati warned, would reduce constitutional rights to a teasing illusion. The Court went further and created epistolary jurisdiction: a letter from an activist could be treated as a constitutional petition. The express purpose, in the Court’s own words, was to let citizens police the corridors of power.
The third is the constitutional status of a critical press. From Romesh Thappar v State of Madras (1950) onward, the Court held free expression and a free press to be the foundation of democratic organisation. In Indian Express Newspapers v Union of India (1984) it put the point candidly: newspapers very often carry material not agreeable to governments and other authorities, and that is precisely their constitutional purpose.
Read together, these three lines describe a single design. The RTI applicant, the PIL petitioner, the journalist who publishes the unpalatable: each is a juridical creature of the Indian Supreme Court, called into constitutional being to do work the Court wanted done. They are not external irritants to the system. They are load-bearing elements the Court itself installed.
From constitutive to proprietary constitutionalism
This is why the cockroach remarks cannot be absorbed as ordinary judicial bad temper. The objection is not that a judge was harsh. It is that the institution delegitimised, in a single sentence, the constitutional actors it spent fifty years legitimising, without overruling a line of the doctrine that created them. The constitutional doctrine still stands, is taught, is cited, and continues to be the formal law.
However, the statutory architecture has been weakened around it: the 2019 amendment to the Right to Information Act replaced the statutorily protected tenure of Information Commissioners and removed their salary parity with the Election Commission, leaving their service conditions for the executive to prescribe. But that erosion was Parliament’s work. What the remarks reveal is something the doctrine alone cannot show. It is a shift in the institution’s posture toward its own handiwork.
There is, to be fair, a genuine and longstanding judicial anxiety about abuse. The Court itself coined the phrase “publicity interest litigation”, and benches including the present Chief Justice have used it since to dismiss frivolous petitions. But those older cautions were directed at extrinsic abuse, at bad-faith litigants exploiting a good-faith mechanism. The 15 May remarks do something categorically different. They do not say that some petitions are frivolous. They say that the people who bring scrutiny, as a class, defined by their unemployment and their failure to find a place, are parasitic on the system. That is not a critique of misuse. It is something else, entirely.
The shift is best captured through Etienne Mureinik’s well-known distinction, drawn from the South African transition, between a culture of authority and a culture of justification: a constitutional democracy is one in which every exercise of public power must be justified, its legitimacy resting on the cogency of reasons offered rather than the force behind them. The framework is not foreign to Indian constitutional argument. It underpins the case for proportionality made by Jahnavi Sindhu and Vikram Aditya Narayan, and Justice Chandrachud invoked it directly in his Aadhaar dissent. But a culture of justification requires more than that courts give reasons. It requires that power-holders, judges included, treat the demand for justification as legitimate, as something owed rather than suffered. The metaphor of the parasite does the opposite. It codes the person who demands justification as biologically anomalous, something to be expelled rather than answered. That is a grammar of authority, not one of justification.
The comparative problem
Across many jurisdictions, apex courts have actively constructed accountability mechanisms through liberalised standing, public interest procedures, reading informational rights into free expression guarantees, extending protection to civil society and the press. The Colombian Constitutional Court did this most expansively, turning the tutela into a fast and almost universally accessible route for citizens to vindicate fundamental rights, to the point that the volume of citizen recourse became itself a measure of the Court’s legitimacy. The South African Constitutional Court built unusually generous standing into the constitutional text and its early jurisprudence, treating wide access as integral to the post-apartheid settlement. These are constitutional achievements. But each carries the same structural hazard. A court that builds the instruments of its own accountability acquires, at the same moment, the authority to claim ownership of them. The Colombian Court has at intervals been described as a sovereign without control, its accessibility generating a caseload that has strained the institution; any such court can come to experience its own openness as a burden. The proprietary posture is already latent: the sense that what the Court extended, the Court may also resent.
What sharpens the hazard in India is the manner of construction. The tutela and the South African standing rules have an anchor in constitutional text; the bench there was building on a written grant. India’s accountability machinery was built almost entirely by judicial fiat, the right to know and the relaxation of standing read into open-textured provisions without an express constitutional mandate. A court that legislated its own accountability mechanisms from the bench has the strongest possible sense of authorship over them, and authorship of that kind is precisely what tempts a court toward ownership. India is therefore not an aberration in the comparative field. It is the case in which the structural temptation is most acute, and the one in which it has been said out loud.
The danger is not that a court will formally overrule its accountability doctrine. Overruling would at least be honest and contestable. The danger is quieter, and it is the one on display in the Indian remarks: the doctrine remains on the books as a kind of monument, while the institution’s lived posture toward it changes underneath.
It might be said that this is not incoherence at all but strategy: a court under political pressure that distances itself from inconvenient allies is behaving rationally, and an institution is not a treatise to be held to the consistency of a single argument. The objection has force, but it does not dissolve the charge. The reason to call this a coherence failure rather than mere prudence is that the Court has not given the doctrine up. It continues to invoke the legitimacy that the right to know, public interest litigation and a protected press confer on it, while withholding the posture toward scrutiny that those same doctrines require. It draws on the credit of its authorship while declining the obligations of it, and that is not a strategy a court can run indefinitely, because the legitimacy it is spending was never the Court’s alone to spend.
This is why judicial rhetoric is a constitutional fact and not a question of manners. When the head of an apex court describes accountability actors as vermin, the statement does work beyond the courtroom: it lowers the political and social cost of treating those actors as vermin. In India, where attacks on RTI users are documented and recurrent, that lowering is not abstract. But the deeper cost is borne by the Court itself. An apex court does not hold its legitimacy outright. Part of it is borrowed from the accountability actors the court protects, from the citizen who can still bring the inconvenient petition and the journalist who can still publish the unpalatable fact, because their continued capacity to act is the standing proof that the constitutional order works. A court that disowns those actors is not only being unkind. It is spending down the very legitimacy that makes its own word authoritative.
The Indian Supreme Court remains free to worry about frivolous litigation and to discipline genuine abuse. What it is not free to do, not without ceasing to be the court its own jurisprudence describes, is to forget that it was the author.
Suggested citation: Eklavya Vasudev, When Apex Courts Disown Their Watchdogs: India, Judicial Accountability, and the Proprietary Turn, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, June 2, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/when-apex-courts-disown-their-watchdogs-india-judicial-accountability-and-the-proprietary-turn/