By: Anand Teltumde [Anand Teltumbde is a civil rights activist, and the author of over 30 books.] Published in: *Frontline* Date: Jun 9, 2026 Source: https://frontline.thehindu.com/columns/surya-kant-parasite-remark-unemployment/article71041381.ece
India’s unemployed youth did not create the conditions that left them without work. Those who did have a different address. It takes a particular kind of audacity—or perhaps a particular kind of insulation from reality—to stand at the apex of a profession that has never produced a single grain of rice, a single metre of cloth, or a single brick of shelter, and to call the unemployed youth of India parasites and cockroaches. Chief Justice of India Surya Kant has managed precisely this feat. Speaking from the elevated comfort of a courtroom that the labour of others built, maintained, and staffed, he described young Indians who cannot find employment as “parasites” and “cockroaches”. The youth of India replied in the only register the powerful consistently underestimate: irreverence. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was born. Three weeks later, hundreds of its supporters—wearing cockroach masks, carrying books and the national flag—marched on Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, demanding the resignation of the Union Education Minister. The CJP will probably not last, given the deep polarisation in society. But the question the CJI’s remark inadvertently opened—and which the noise of outrage and counter-outrage has obscured—deserves a serious answer. Not: was the language offensive? Obviously. But: who, in the economy of this republic, actually produces the wealth on which everyone else subsists? Who are, if the term must be used at all, the real parasites? Begin with the basics that every schoolchild once learned and every political establishment has conspired to forget. Wealth is produced by labour applied to nature. The farmer who breaks the soil, plants the seed, and carries the harvest to the mandi produces something real: food, without which the CJI, the Cabinet Minister, and the newspaper editor would be dead within weeks. The construction worker who lays brick produces the shelter in which the entire apparatus of governance and adjudication conducts its affairs. The weaver, the machinist, the sanitation worker who keeps the city from drowning in its own filth, the nurse, the teacher, the engineer, and the doctor—these people produce the material and social conditions upon which everything else rests. What does a judge produce? This is not a disrespectful question; it is the most respectful one, because it takes the institution seriously enough to examine what it actually contributes. A judge provides a service—the settlement of disputes, the maintenance of order. But a judge produces nothing material. The judge lives, entirely, on surplus extracted from those who do produce. The same is true of every politician, every bureaucrat, every member of the vast apparatus of administration, regulation, and adjudication that has grown, in independent India, to proportions that would have staggered even its colonial architects. The oldest question in political economy This is among the oldest observations in political economy. The Physiocrats of 18th-century France divided society into the productive class and the sterile class. Adam Smith distinguished productive from unproductive labour. Marx built on this his labour theory of value: all value is produced by labour alone; surplus value—the excess produced over what the labourer needs to subsist—is appropriated by those who own the means of production and by those whose function is to maintain that appropriation: the state, the church, the legal system. The CJI, on this analysis, is not a producer of social value. He is, in the classical sense, a member of the parasitic class—and a generously compensated one at that. According to India’s Economic Survey 2024-25, the country needs to create roughly 7.85 million non-agricultural jobs every year until 2030 to accommodate its expanding workforce. The young people who cannot find work—the “parasites” and “cockroaches” of the CJI’s taxonomy—are not unemployed because they lack ambition or willingness to work. They are unemployed because the economy has been deliberately organised to serve capital-intensive businesses over labour-intensive production; to dismantle the small-scale manufacturing sector that once absorbed millions; to keep agricultural wages at levels that make rural life unviable without providing the urban employment that might replace it; and to concentrate the gains of growth in a narrow stratum while the majority scrambles for a shrinking pool of opportunity. Who made these choices? Politicians—who produce nothing and whose livelihoods derive entirely from taxes levied on those who do produce. Who administered them? The Indian Administrative Service—lauded by Sardar Patel as the “steel frame” of the republic, a frame that has proved more effective at protecting its own members, politicians, and the propertied classes than at delivering the services it theoretically exists to provide. Who legitimised them? The judiciary—which, in its decades of adjudication on labour rights, land rights, and the rights of the poor, has compiled a record that the CJI might find uncomfortable to examine under the strict constitutional scrutiny he so freely applies to the unemployed. A pattern, not a lapse On this last point, the record must be stated plainly, because it goes to the heart of the matter. If the republic finds itself in the pathetic condition it does today—its democracy strained, its civil liberties under siege, its institutions hollowed, and its economy in ruins—the judiciary must bear the largest share of responsibility. It is, after all, the constitutionally mandated custodian of the republic. And its failures have been neither minor nor occasional; they have been systematic. The Supreme Court’s passivity in the face of the abrogation of Article 370 and the unconstitutional lockdown of an entire people in Kashmir; its silence on the Electoral Bonds scheme that turned political funding into institutionalised opacity; its inaction on Pegasus surveillance and the weaponisation of UAPA against dissenters; its failure to strike down the Citizenship Amendment Act’s discriminatory logic; its studied indifference to demolition politics used as extrajudicial punishment; its retreat before executive aggrandisement at precisely the moments when constitutional intervention was most required—this is not a catalogue of individual lapses. It is a pattern, a pattern of an institution that chose the comfort of deference over the duty of independence. The legal profession more broadly deserves the same scrutiny. A lawyer produces nothing. A lawyer’s income derives entirely from the existence of disputes—disputes which, in a rationally organised society, would either not arise or be settled without professional intermediaries. The system’s extraordinary complexity, its procedural impenetrability, its inaccessibility to anyone without years of specialised training and substantial financial resources, is not an accident. It is, from one angle of vision, a business model. The more inaccessible justice is to ordinary people, the more indispensable the professional who mediates access to it. The bar has resisted every reform that might have made justice cheaper, faster, and more accessible—because it has a direct material interest in the dysfunction it publicly deplores. This is not an argument against the rule of law. It is an argument against the sanctimony of those who benefit from a system organised in their own interests, calling those excluded from it by names that properly describe themselves. If a parasite is one who lives at the expense of others without contributing value, then the legal profession—charging fees that a farmer must work months to accumulate for a single hearing in a case that may take decades to resolve—has a prior claim to the title the CJI has so freely distributed. The hereditary republic, the upside-down republic And then there is the political class, where outrage has become almost redundant. With rare exceptions, Indian politics has degenerated into a hereditary profession, transmitting power through family networks in a manner reminiscent of the very feudal order it once claimed to abolish. It has also become one of the most lucrative occupations for the unscrupulous and the criminally inclined. More than any other group, it represents a parasitic class living off the public exchequer and, ultimately, the labour of those who grow, make, build, and move the goods on which society depends. In return, it increasingly offers not governance but the manufacture of identity-based outrage, communal polarisation, religious intoxication, and propaganda as a substitute for performance. There is a word in the classical Indian philosophical tradition for this kind of systematic inversion: viparita—the reversed, the upside-down, the condition in which the relationship between reality and its representation has been deliberately scrambled. In the viparita economy of contemporary India, those who are desirous of working but cannot find employment are called parasites by those who do not produce anything and are partly responsible for their unemployment. Those who grow food are less valued than those who trade it. Those who build houses cannot afford to live in them. Those who make clothes wear rags. And parasites become the VIPs. The CJI has performed an inadvertent public service. He has surfaced a question that this republic’s political economy has been carefully organised to prevent us from asking too loudly. Not whether the unemployed are parasites—but: in an economy that cannot employ its own people, in a republic that has failed its constitutional promise of dignified livelihood for seven decades, in a society where the children of the powerful inherit opportunity as reliably as the children of the powerless inherit deprivation—who, exactly, is living off whom? The cockroach, it is worth noting, is among the most resilient creatures on earth. It has survived conditions that exterminated far more celebrated species. It is not, on reflection, the worst thing to be called by those who fear what it represents. Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet India Limited (PIL), a professor at IIT Kharagpur and Goa Institute of Management, a civil rights activist, and the author of over 30 books.
