As the incumbent Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant's term reaches its denouement, it would seem that his future aspirations are increasingly taking control of his being, as is revealed in the aspersions cast on some sections of society. The moment the CJI, the highest judicial office in India, decided to equate the unemployed, RTI activists, and media workers with cockroaches, the issue ceased to be about judicial irritation. It has categorically become a question about the moral collapse of the constitutional language in our country.

Words matter heavily when spoken from the apex. A judge is not a television panellist or a social media troll. As the custodian of the Constitution, the final guarantor of dignity, liberty, equality and justice, the vocabulary of infestation has consequences.

Such language has always been the precursor to the worst of violence in the world. In Nazi Germany, Jews were called parasites, vermin and rats long before concentration camps had even emerged. Such language is always employed for a singular purpose: to reduce human beings into threats. Once sections of human beings come to be imaged as a problem, the cruelty against them doesn't seem to be horrific, just as one does not hesitate to squash cockroaches underfoot.

The Chief Justice's remark must be analysed in its sitz im Leben. It is just the preface of the result of more than a decade of relentless parroting of the anti-minority agenda by a certain group. Instead of any actual vikas, we have been normalising a politics of dehumanisation. Muslims are called termites, activists are branded Urban Naxals, Dalits are a threat to the order, journalists are anti-nationals, students are traitors, and Christians are converters. The language may change for convenience, but what it seeks to do is strip a target and justify any hostility against them.

The tragedy is that this vocabulary has now travelled from political platforms into constitutional institutions. That is what makes the Chief Justice's remarks infinitely more dangerous than the speech of an ordinary politician. A politician seeks votes; a judge is constitutionally obligated to defend rights even against popular prejudice. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. Article 19 protects the right to dissent and free expression. Article 21 guarantees the right to live with dignity.

Divisionary politics thrives precisely through such desensitisation. Communities slowly stop seeing one another as fellow citizens and begin viewing each other as contaminants, threats, or enemies. Hate, then, ceases to be exceptional and becomes administrative culture.

India cannot preserve its constitutional soul unless this ideological poison is confronted directly. Hindutva has corrupted public discourse, institutional behaviour and administrative morality with majoritarian arrogance and contempt for dissent. It must be removed from governance and public institutions if the Republic is to survive as a constitutional democracy.

Otherwise, the cockroaches of today will become the expendables of tomorrow, and history has already shown us how such stories end.