Aren't We All Cockroaches?

No matter how it is framed or softened in institutional language, what a section of India’s judiciary once said by comparing unemployed youth to “cockroaches” remains unacceptable in any serious democratic order.

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

Not because judges are not entitled to critique society, but because language from institutions that claim moral neutrality does not float above society. It sinks into it. It becomes sediment in public consciousness, especially in societies already saturated with frustration, inequality, and institutional fatigue.

When unemployment is widespread, when entry into stable work is mediated by examinations that fail, leak or collapse in public trust, and when entire cohorts of educated youth experience a prolonged delay in adulthood, words from authority do not merely describe reality. They define it. This is precisely what, in earlier stages of human civilization, was done in the name of casteism, slavery or tribalism, to justify exclusion and domination.

Instead of confronting these moral and structural failures, modern political authorities tend to re-engineer and repackage social fatigue in humanity into new forms.

Unemployment in most societies is not primarily a moral failure of individuals. It is an outcome of structural arrangements including uneven access to opportunity, concentration of economic power, credential inflation, and political economies that distribute growth unevenly. In that sense, the language of blame directed at youth functions less as diagnosis and more as displacement. It relocates systemic dysfunction onto those who experience it most acutely. The result is not clarity but distortion. Systems that fail to absorb their own educated populations often resort, consciously or otherwise, to rhetorical simplification. The unemployed become “unmotivated”, the critical become “disruptive”, the protesting become “misguided”, and in more extreme rhetorical registers, they become something less than fully human.