During a Supreme Court hearing on May 15, Chief Justice Surya Kant said that unemployed young people in India drift towards activism and attack the system like “cockroaches.” The honourable Chief Justice probably had no inkling of the political storm his words would set off, generating a new online political platform, a new language and catchy slogans. The ‘unemployed’ and the ‘lazy’ were invited to join the parody political brand, with the cockroach embraced as a respectable political metaphor.

Never before have we seen such creative use of satire. The language is polite and urbane, there is no anger at being likened to cockroaches, no counter-allegations and no complaints. However, all that was needed to be said, is conveyed. The satirist makes gentle fun of something that should not have been said and of a system that should be interrogated. Within this fun filled messaging, is aggression and a sharp comment on the state and society. Are the unemployed responsible for their state of being/non-being, or is it the society that should be held to account?

Since the history of ideas throws light on what many of us, including distinguished jurists, may not perceive, let me go back briefly to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to understand the answer to the question posed above. But before that, a caveat is in order. Not every unemployed person is poor. Nevertheless, it is fairly evident that many of the unemployed belong, or will at some point belong, to the category of poverty. Armed with this caveat, let me get back to Hegel and his concern for the poor. 

In his magnificently crafted Philosophy of Right (1820), Hegel wrote that poverty is not an aberration. It is a product of industrial society and of the system of overproduction and under-consumption. It is, precisely this society, that banishes its victim to the twilight zone of poverty. We would do well to heed Hegel’s wisdom: “Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another.” 

It is this wrong that the slogan of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has illuminated by inverting the terms of engagement. If we read between the lines of a light-heartedly plotted manifesto and the careful selection of words, we can discern an aggressive message: who is responsible for unemployment?

Satire points to the existence and importance of an underlying norm or state of affairs by playing up its opposite. Yes, we are unemployed, but is this not a consequence of your social and economic order. The satirist assaults the target by their play of words and........

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