The strange thing about any Republic is when an institution that was created to listen starts to teach the people how to feel. One such moment happened in India on Monday when the Chief Justice of India, disagreeing to urgently consider two petitions related to the runaway "Cockroach Janta Party" satire campaign, advised the petitioning advocate: "Don't take it so sentimentally.

Three words. Said almost in passing. Yet they did manage to capture the increasing disconnect between the bench and the country it rests on, rather uncomfortably. The movements creators were doing exactly what the Chief Justice suggested they shouldn't, namely satirizing him. There was an emotion among them. Sentimentally.The original comment was made during a hearing on May 15 on a petition filed by an attorney seeking senior-advocate status. The bench, while looking down upon the filing as ‘frivolous', noted that ‘parasites of society are attacking institutions, and some youngsters without jobs are turning into cockroaches as they couldn't find a platform in any profession, they drifted into media activism, social media commentary and RTE campaigning. Twenty-four hours later a clarification was issued. The criticism, the Chief Justice explained, was directed against those entering the profession with fake degrees and not against India's young. It is the youth that is the backbone of an advanced India, he said.

The clarification was in fact both lawful, and generous in spirit. It also happened after the cockroach had left the courthouse for the algorithm.

What has ensued is unprecedented in the nation's court system. A flaky organization that called itself the digitally organized digital outfit, the ‘Cockroach Janta Party', with a mock manifesto, four-point charter and a logo was able to attract nearly 2 million followers across platforms in days. The campaign received its strongest backing from younger generations those born in the last decade or so who are on the internet and also suffering from mass unemployment, high inflation and a rough social atmosphere, Al Jazeera reported. The petition Monday called for a Central Bureau of Investigation investigation into the network as “an organised attempt to use the recordings of the courtroom for political use for monetary gains”. The bench comprising Chief Justice and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V.M. Pancholi said that there was no immediate urgency and the petitioners would be heard at an appropriate time.

The law record stops there. The civic record is more interesting.

A nation that has a labour issues difficulty.

In order to comprehend the reasons behind a phrase's effectiveness as a thrown stone, examine the economy that it landed in. On paper, India's overall unemployment rate is low. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report 2025, the overall youth unemployment rate of the labour force (above fifteen years) was 9.9 percent, with 13.6 percent in the urban areas and 8.3 percent in the rural areas. The latest quarterly print was even higher, as youth unemployment increased to 15 percent in January–March, the worst performance in four quarters, and to 17.7 percent for young women.Unemployment has been estimated in the seven to eight per cent bracket for some time now by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) that has conducted the monthly Consumer Pyramids survey, which runs hotter than the official series and has often recorded high unemployment in the urban centres. Today, the Indian economy is creating about a crore new workers per year, but formal sector jobs are still being created at the same slow rate as they were 15 years ago, and manufacturing's employment elasticity is approximately half of what it was in the past. According to ManpowerGroup, job plans for the April-to-June quarter decreased to a well below the post-Covid peak net employment outlook.

Compare it with the wealth boom of the stock market, which has seen the top 10% of earners become richer by a whole section of the income ladder, against the world's most expensive private school education by income share and against the rental market in metropolitan India, where a one-bedroom apartment in an urban area now costs more than the entry-level salary that’s supposed to afford it, and you start to understand why the audience for that 12-second clip was already raring to go.

But the young people of the Republic are not protesting due to a lack of understanding of the Chief Justice. Their protests are because they have been told for 10 years that they are the demographic dividend for which they are not the ones who have received the dividend.

The side legal that the public did not see

A legal, defensible interpretation of court testimony. The complaints about the senior advocate designation in India have been there for years and they have been raising the issue of opacity, lobbying and gatekeeping. Scammers have been a reality and have been detected in various Bar Councils in the past five years. That, in itself, is not judicial overreach, however, when a Chief Justice, exasperated at somebody aggressively claiming a designation on that backdrop, decides to step in. It's, more or less, the day-to-day idiom of oral argument in any apex court, anyplace in the world.

The problem is that the Indian Supreme Court's oral comments spread further and faster than ever before. All hearings can be broadcast events as the result of live-streaming. The petition brought before the court Monday actually raised the question of the commercial exploitation of recorded exchange in the courtroom through viral platforms, and it isn't a silly one. Indeed, it's one of the more serious institutional issues that Indian judiciary will be forced to address this decade. The audio of the courtroom is part of the constitutional commons. The monetisation of it on clip farms and meme economies is a space without regulation.

But the remedy for that void can't be a CBI investigation into a satirical movement. The solution is a clear and transparent protocol to deal with archived court audio, a clear safe harbour for fair use commentary and greater institutional tolerance for being laughed at. In a republic, if a mockery is not to be borne, the republic itself cannot endure long.

What the bench didn't have to say

The more serious uneasiness isn't legal. It is rhetorical.

The same Chief Justice has faced an open letter from former judges and senior lawyers in the space of six months for his dehumanising remarks about Rohingya refugees. A former chief justice of the Delhi High Court and senior lawyers Rajeev Dhavan and Colin Gonsalves in a letter wrote that, "Words of the head of the judiciary are significant not only in courtrooms, but in the conscience of the nation and reverberate through the high courts, the lower judiciary and other government bodies.

The whole issue lies in that last clause. It is not as if the Chief Justice of India is just another constitutional officer. The court he presides over is the last bastion of the dignity of the very groups he is trying to dignify from the bench. The chilling effect permeates the entire judiciary, from the lower courts to the Magistrates to the Tribunals, to every District judge who now must determine whether sentiment is something to be respected under the law or something to be dismissed.

The advice not to be sentimental is far from harmless. Sentiment does not contradict the law. It is the vehicle of legitimation of law. If the people don't feel anything when they walk into a courtroom, then they've already given up on that courtroom.

The global mirror

There are other places where India's moment is rhyming. In recent years Britain's Supreme Court has held its ground against tabloid campaigns that have accused its judges of being enemies of the people, the justices as a group absorbing the criticism, improving their communication with the public, and resisting the use of contempt powers as a first resort. The United States Supreme Court is in the low 40s in Gallup polling, in the worst numbers of its history, and the court's defenders have done little more than argue. In part, South Africa's Constitutional Court has established its post-apartheid moral standing by its constant readiness to be queried in public.

By contrast, the Indian judiciary enjoys a relatively high public confidence, and this has been the case consistently, even outperforming Parliament, the executive and the press. It's an asset to have that standing. It's also a delicate one and it's not saved by “threatening” satirical movements as criminal conspiracies.

What ought to come next

The petitions shall be heard "in due course," the bench said. In all likelihood they will be ignored or simply rolled into a larger initiative to regulate audio in the courtroom. Like all viral campaigns, the satire campaign will have a half-life and the next viral moment will be here within the fortnight.

The question the moment poses is what will remain. The country with a double-digit youth-unemployment rate, and a labour-force participation rate of young women still lower than that of most other Asian countries, and a generation that sees the digital economy rewarding founders while penalising job-seekers by a factor of about two, was always going to hit back at being called a parasite. Clarification was in order and issued. In the end, it was not enough.

The bench should also keep in mind that what they have been asked to ignore are sentiments that the Constitution they are interpreting was designed to safeguard. India has not framed a Republic with a view to have an unsentimental attitude towards its citizens. It prepared one because it was sentimental about them in a profound way.