Sparked with insult, poked with innuendo, replied with mockery

Giving and taking offence is a sizeable part of Indian public life, and it has a legal history.

Key points

• Arvind Rajagopal Professor of media studies at New York University and author of The Indian Public Sphere and Politics After Television.
• Ambedkar informed the Constituent Assembly in 1949 that we were entering a life of contradictions: equality in politics, inequality in social and economic life.
• On May 15, hearing a contempt petition, the Chief Justice of India likened unemployed young individuals to cockroaches and parasites attacking institutions through social media activism and litigation.
• Hence the difficulty with the phrase applied from the Red Fort on August 15.
• Since the insult in question identified no such channel, which makes the seven-week sit-in at Jantar Mantar worth examining.

Giving and taking offence is a sizeable part of Indian public life, and it has a legal history. The Indian Penal Code's Section 295A. It criminalises acts intended to outrage religious feelings, was drafted in 1927 after a quarrel over a scurrilous pamphlet. Rather than containing communal conflict, it supplied the vocabulary for conducting it: complainants learned to say their feelings had been wounded, and in saying so produced the feeling. The law educated its subjects in outrage, and that education has mostly served reactionary ends. Today, it corresponds to Section 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

On May 15, hearing a contempt petition, the Chief Justice of India likened unemployed young individuals to cockroaches and parasites attacking institutions through social media activism and litigation. He reframed it afterwards, but he had disclosed what everyone recognised perhaps as the oldest law of society: that the robust may scorn the subdued.

Within a day, a post on X asked what would happen if all the cockroaches came together. By nightfall, there was a website and a set of handles. Ten weeks afterwards, the Union education minister had resigned-an act without precedent in this government's 12 years. Those mobilised were the educated unemployed. This person had no identity to defend or temple to protect.

When individuals discover that their claims converge on the same authority, politics ordinarily begins with a demand. This protest was sparked by an insult. It is a different thing-and the difference is where the interest lies.

Since it ridiculed young individuals for doing no more than trying to produce their way by the means available to them, the insult disclosed a structure of feeling one might call anti-social. Once, the majority were denied education by the rules of caste. As though society bore no responsibility for them, today, they are educated and unemployed, and mocked from the Bench for it. Such a negative form of sociality is what caste has always practised.

Hierarchy of this kind works by shaming, without ever stating itself. A young man informed to wait outside, served tea in a separate glass, asked his surname before his marks are handed over: none of it can be lodged anywhere. Its efficiency lies in becoming a property of the sufferer: a sense of one's own place, carried regarding and even defended.

This is the psychic life of power. In Judith Butler's phrase: subordination does not merely constrain a person, it forms one. It is through such unrecorded daily traffic that caste is maintained. Ambedkar put it at its sharpest in Annihilation of Caste: the missionary religions had been cruel, forcing their truths on the unwilling; the Hindu had been mean, keeping others in darkness rather than share an inheritance, and meanness is worse than cruelty.

It is meanness one hears in the name "cockroach": not the wish to destroy, but the refusal to admit. The law defines the act of discrimination but not the attitude, and attitudes shift only when what may be remarked in public shifts. Which is what a remark from the Bench does and a remark in a corridor cannot: it is dated, attributable, replayable and can therefore be answered.

For context, the old order has not given way; it has relocated. Within months of the 2012 Supreme Court judgement upholding the Right to Education Act, a Dalit organisation in Bengaluru alleged that quota children at a city school had had tufts of hair cut off so that they could be informed apart at a glance, and were seated at the back with their lunch baskets kept separate. The mark of distinction, once carried in a name or a street, had been reissued as a haircut.

Exclusion migrates from the prohibition to the procedure. The gate is open and the threshold is technical: the entrance test, the admissions portal, the merit scale. Nobody now notes that you may not enter. According to It is, you did not qualify. Meanness has acquired a technique, and the technique claims neutrality.

But no technique is neutral in that way. Each displaces those already in place and sets fresh conditions of access, the points at which strangers meet and at which a claim is registered or refused. Whoever shapes those conditions shapes the politics that follows. The examination hall, the administration portal and the platform feed-each announces universality at the entrance and performs the sorting inside.

Consider our recent mobilisations in this light. The Anna Hazare agitation of 2011 was not so much covered by the media as co-produced with them: visibility became fulfilment, the image the destination and the yield modest, less in the end than that of the Right to Information Act, won by a rural movement with no fanfare. The kisan andolan of 2020-21 inverted the arrangement. Denied the national channels, the farmers created their own, sat on the highways off-camera for 15 months, and obtained the laws repealed.

Meanwhile, the cockroaches have learned from both. Television offered the Jantar Mantar sit-in little, so the students filmed it themselves, in reels and memes and dark jokes. And when mobile internet was throttled on July 20 and 16 Delhi metro stations shut, footage of the lathi-charge that sent some 150 to hospital surfaced anyways, hours late and twice as damaging. They treat the old media as weather, to be navigated rather than courted.

Hence the difficulty with the phrase applied from the Red Fort on August 15. "Dimagi Naxal" asks us to look for a mind behind the disturbance: a doctrine, a cadre, a foreign hand. But there is no doctrine here: marchers carried the tricolour and the Constitution, not party flags.

Nor will this pass with the monsoon: it is demographic. The ILO's 2024 count discovered the young making up 83 per cent of India's unemployed, and graduates nine times likelier to be jobless than those who cannot read. The CJP's after on Instagram is twice the ruling party's, and the parents are inside the movement, having mortgaged themselves for the coaching fees.

In practice, a generation that has grown up with the BJP in power since it was in high school has answered not by falling into line but with carnival and mockery. The CJP is a withdrawal of the audience, and for a politics that runs on being watched there is no more serious loss.

Ambedkar informed the Constituent Assembly in 1949 that we were entering a life of contradictions: equality in politics, inequality in social and economic life. Those who suffer the inequality, he cautioned, would one day blow up the political democracy the Assembly had so laboriously built. The cockroaches are blowing nothing up. They are announcing that the times have changed, and that they have nothing to lose by moving with them.

In the same speech, Ambedkar named the danger on the other side. Bhakti in religion, he remarked, might be a road to the salvation of the soul, but in politics hero-worship "is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship". A generation that has halted worshipping has taken the first step back off that road.

In short, sparked with insult, poked with innuendo, replied with mockery is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.