Written by: Jehosh Paul5 min readMay 16, 2026 11:25 AM IST First published on: May 16, 2026 at 11:25 AM ISTOn May 15, the Chief Justice of India, Justice Surya Kant, made a remark from the bench that has since circulated widely. While hearing a contempt petition filed by advocate Sanjay Dubey, which alleged non-compliance with the Supreme Court’s own Senior Advocate designation guidelines, the CJI described unemployed young people who turn to RTI activism, journalism, and social media as “cockroaches” and “parasites of society.” The petition may or may not have had merit. What the remarks did, regardless of that question, was characterise an entire class of citizens exercising statutory and constitutional rights in terms at odds with how Indian courts have understood their own role.The Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence offers a different account of who these citizens are. In Fertilizer Corporation Kamgar Union v. Union of India (1981), Justice V R Krishna Iyer wrote that access to justice must account for the fact that “the individual is pitted against the State — always an unequal contest,” and that courts could not remain indifferent to those without resources to challenge institutional power. In the same year, Justice P N Bhagwati in S P Gupta v. Union of India (1981) wrote that “any member of the public acting bona fide” could approach the court on behalf of those unable to do so themselves, and that restricting locus standi to those with direct personal injury was a principle of ancient vintage unsuited to a constitutional democracy. These rulings became the doctrinal foundation of public interest litigation in India, a jurisdiction the Supreme Court has exercised ever since.AdvertisementAlso Read | On NCERT books, Chief Justice Surya Kant’s anger is justifiedThe Right to Information Act sits within the same constitutional logic. In Central Public Information Officer v. Subhash Chandra Agarwal (2019), a five-judge constitution bench held that the office of the Chief Justice of India itself fell within the RTI’s ambit. RTI activists, under that ruling, are not attacking the system. They are using a mechanism that the system constructed, and the Court affirmed.The CJI’s remarks drew a different picture. The people he described (young lawyers without employment, citizens using RTI, journalists and social media commentators) were cast as having turned to these activities out of failure rather than right. The economic reality of the junior bar makes that characterisation harder to sustain. A Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy survey of 2,800 advocates found that 40 per cent of respondents at multiple High Courts estimated young lawyers earned between Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 per month in their first two years. A Bar Council of India circular from October 2024 acknowledged that “junior advocates often face significant financial challenges during the early years of their careers” and recommended, without being able to mandate, a minimum monthly stipend of Rs 20,000 in urban areas. For lawyers in this position, RTI applications, legal journalism, and public interest litigation are among the few meaningful ways to remain connected to the law they were trained in. Describing that engagement as parasitism inverts the account the Court itself has given of what such participation means.The irony runs deeper when one considers what prompted the remarks. The petition before the CJI was filed under the framework of Indira Jaising v. Supreme Court of India, in which the Court itself had mandated transparency in Senior Advocate designations. A citizen invoking the Court’s own accountability mechanism was answered with a broadside against citizens who invoke accountability mechanisms.AdvertisementThere is also a question of what the bench’s language does, independent of any ruling. Justice D Y Chandrachud, in Arnab Ranjan Goswami v. Union of India (2020), a case concerning the liberty of a journalist, wrote that “India’s freedoms will rest safe as long as journalists can speak to power without being chilled by a threat of reprisal,” and that subjecting citizens to institutional pressure for exercising speech rights “will effectively destroy the freedom of the citizen to know of the affairs of governance in the nation.” That principle was not offered as a protection only for those with institutional standing. It was articulated as something the Court owed to citizens generally, including those expressing disagreement through unconventional or inconvenient means.you may likeThe concern here is not about any particular ruling or the CJI’s broader record on the bench. It is narrower. Language that sorts citizens into those who engage legitimately with institutions and those who are merely parasitic does not emerge from nowhere, and it does not stay in the courtroom. It shapes how lawyers frame their clients’ claims, how junior judges read the bench’s expectations, and how ordinary people calculate whether approaching a court is worth the risk of being received with contempt.The Supreme Court has, over decades, built a body of doctrine that treats citizen engagement with legal and constitutional mechanisms as something to be encouraged rather than managed. The RTI, PIL, and press freedom jurisprudence of the Court is, taken together, a record of an institution extending itself toward citizens rather than drawing back from them. Remarks that describe the citizens most likely to use those mechanisms in dehumanising terms create a tension with that record, not because any single remark determines outcomes, but because the Court’s authority has always rested, in part, on the belief that it is genuinely open to everyone.The writer is a lawyer and development consultant