On May 15, 2026, the incumbent chief justice of India, Surya Kant, looked out at a nation where nearly one in three young people cannot find work and called them cockroaches.
Let that sink in. The man who swore an oath to uphold justice, who presides over the highest court of the world’s largest democracy, stood before a courtroom and compared millions of desperate, humiliated, abandoned young men and women to insects that scatter when the lights come on.
He later claimed that he was misquoted, but he did not apologize. He revealed, in a single vile metaphor, exactly whose side the judiciary’s elite has been on all along.
The chief justice’s remark was not an outburst. It was a confession.
Parasites are not the people whose lives have been derailed, but the vermin disrupting modern politics, rigging the economy to prevent wealth from circulating freely, and feeding on the misery their behavior has imposed on others.
In February 2025, Kant’s predecessor, Supreme Court Justice B.R. Gavai, sparked significant controversy while hearing a plea regarding shelter for the urban homeless.
Gavai remarked that election “freebies” and free rations were creating a “class of parasites” who were unwilling to work or integrate into the mainstream workforce.
Belarus & Russia have both actively considered or implemented policies targeting the unemployed. Belarus notably introduced a “social parasite law” that fined citizens who worked less than 183 days a year, sparking widespread citizen protests. Russia’s labor ministry also proposed an annual tax on able-bodied unemployed individuals.
During President Donald Trump’s mass layoffs, right-wing media figures repeatedly criticized federal workers, even calling them “worthless parasites” and “entitled” employees who do nothing and don’t have real jobs.
A cascade of conservative commentators disparaged the 30,000 federal employees who lost their jobs in late February 2025, likening them to parasites, leeches, and fat cats as the Trump administration moved to slash the government workforce.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk called government employees “worthless parasites on the American taxpayer” and added, “You are a leech on us.”
Megyn Kelly dismissed layoffs with a sarcastic “Boohoo, a bureaucrat got fired,” asking, “Why do you think you deserve to have your federal fat cat bureaucrat job forever?”
Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson said private-sector workers face firings “every day” without “coddling,” while Fox host Jesse Watters labeled federal workers “entitled bureaucrats” who need an “attitude adjustment.”
Fox’s Laura Ingraham dismissed “sob stories” of the laid-off, and contributor Lisa Kennedy Montgomery called some federal employees “completely worthless” for being unable to justify their jobs.
For five decades, a quiet, methodical class war has been waged against working people on every continent. In the United States, it began in the 1970s when productivity unhitched from wages.
In India, it accelerated with the neoliberal turn of 1991, when corrupt politicians opened the floodgates to oligarchs who understood one simple truth: financial power buys political power, and political power writes the rules.
The result, everywhere, is the same.
An estimated $88 trillion has been transferred from the bottom 90 percent of earners to the top 1 percent since the 1970s. Workers today produce more, yet take home less.
Pensions have vanished, replaced by 401(k)s that turn retirement into a gamble. Labor unions, once the only shield working people had, were systematically broken. And in India, the informal economy swallowed hundreds of millions, leaving them without contracts, without benefits, without the barest dignity.
Now those same working people watch their children graduate into nothing. A degree in hand, debt on the back, and no job in sight. They are not lazy. They are not parasites.
They are the victims of a forty-year looting spree by the richest one percent of the planet, aided and abetted by neoliberal politicians of every party who deregulated, privatized, and handed state assets to their cronies for a fraction of their value.
In some ways, the public is waking up and fighting back, but most Americans do not even recognize that there is a class war going on.
Historic spikes in labor union organizing, as tracked by the National Labor Relations Board, highlight localized fights for better wages and working conditions. Workers conducted unprecedented strikes at Amazon and Starbucks.
Christian Smalls, a New Jersey native and former assistant manager at the mega-corporation’s Staten Island warehouse, led the April 1, 2022, vote to form the Amazon Labor Union.
At first, Starbucks workers were told it was impossible to organize so many small shops with high turnover. But in just three years, they brought together over 10,000 co-workers across more than 500 locations.
And the chief justice of India calls these young people cockroaches.
Who is the true parasite?
The true parasite is the oligarch who dodges taxes by hiding wealth in shell companies while the state cuts subsidies for fertilizer and school meals. The true parasite is the politician who accepts corporate donations in exchange for favorable land acquisition laws, then sends police to evict slum dwellers.
The true parasite is the judge who sits on a lifetime appointment, immune from the jobless queue, and sneers at those who were never given the same head start. Parasites do not build. They attach themselves to a host, drain its resources, and when the host weakens, they call the host’s suffering children vermin.
Justice Kant’s words are not merely cruel. They are a window into a rotting system. India’s unemployment crisis is not a natural disaster. It is a policy choice. A choice to privilege capital over labor, to replace public enterprises with private monopolies, to keep wages low and unions crushed.
The same choice was made in Washington, London, and Brasília.
The same choice that has left rural towns in Maine with empty storefronts and men pouring gasoline over their heads at gas pumps. The same choice that has driven Naxalite rebels into the forests of Chhattisgarh, where they fight not because they love violence but because the state abandoned the tribal poor decades ago.
When Justice Kant uses the language of infestation, he aligns himself with every feudal landlord who has ever burned a Dalit village, every Ranvir Sena killer who shot women and children in Bihar to preserve a hierarchy of birth and wealth.
He may not carry a gun, but his words arm the mob. They tell the powerful that the powerless deserve their suffering.
There is another way. It does not demand that everyone get the same slice of pie. That is a straw man the rich use to mock equality.
Real equality means sharing the recipe. It means ensuring that every child has clean water, good food, a safe home, a fair wage, and a livable planet. Not as charity. As a baseline. It means equal treatment free from discrimination. Equal rights under the law. Equal opportunity not just to survive, but to thrive. For everyone.
That world is not a fantasy. It is the one we were promised before the oligarchs rewrote the rules.
It is the world of the New Deal and the post-war settlement, of the Kerala model and the Nordic welfare states. It is the world that working people in Amazon warehouses and Starbucks counters and Kansas City tenements are beginning to fight for again.
They are striking, organizing, and refusing to be grateful for crumbs. They are learning that the class war was never about laziness versus ambition. It was about who gets to decide the value of a human life.
The chief justice of India has made his decision. He sees the jobless as cockroaches. We see them as our neighbors, our children, ourselves. And we are done being quiet.
Let us see the world as it is: a few thousand billionaires hoarding more wealth than the bottom four billion, while politicians in silk suits call the unemployed parasites.
Let us look reality squarely in the eye and demand better.
Not because we want handouts. Because we want justice.
Because a nation that calls its young people vermin has already lost its soul. The future is not a cockroach’s scuttle in the dark. The future is equal. And it starts now.
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