1. THE MEDDLING LAWYER

At sixty seven and advancing rapidly to the next birthday, Mathews J. Nedumpara can scarcely be described as a youth. Yet he possesses the most dangerous quality of youth: an unwillingness to know when he has lost and the gut to fight on nevertheless..

His surname, Nedumpara, roughly meaning a great rock in his native Malayalam. After watching his encounters with the higher judiciary over the last decade, one suspects the name was not accidentally bestowed. He has spent years standing where most advocates would have quietly retreated, inviting judicial wrath with a persistence that borders on the geological.

Like many revolutionaries, Nedumpara is partly right, partly wrong, and wholly unwilling to compromise.

For more than a decade he has been among the most relentless critics of the collegium system, judicial appointments, the designation of Senior Advocates, and what he perceives as the hereditary nature of India’s higher judiciary. His weapons were not swords or slogans but petitions, interviews, Facebook posts, blogs, public speeches and, occasionally, an extraordinary capacity to irritate judges.

Whether one agrees with him or not, he succeeded in forcing uncomfortable questions into public discussion.

The discovery of large quantities of burnt currency following the fire at the official residence of Delhi High Court judge Justice Yashwant Varma gave fresh life to arguments about transparency and accountability in the judiciary. Likewise, the repeated spectacle of judges resigning shortly before impeachment proceedings could mature into formal removal only strengthened the suspicions of those who believed the system protected its own.

Nedumpara found in such episodes confirmation of what he had been saying for years.

Curiously, his public reputation rests less upon representing wealthy corporations, celebrated criminals or high-profile litigants than upon his running battle with the judicial establishment itself. Yet surviving as an advocate in Bombay in a chamber of his own with associate lawyers and office staff for more than four decades is evidence enough that he knows his trade.

Around 2015 Nedumpara founded the National Lawyers’ Campaign for Judicial Transparency and Reforms. On that platform he mobilized first-generation lawyers, compiled elaborate charts showing family relationships within the higher judiciary and launched a sustained assault on what he described as the feudal character of the legal profession.

To his supporters, he was a reformer. To his critics, he was a professional provocateur. To many judges, he was something worse: a litigant who refused to take hints.

His challenges eventually culminated in a series of petitions questioning the constitutional validity of the Senior Advocate designation system itself. The argument was simple. Dividing lawyers into “Senior Advocates” and everyone else created an elite club whose privileges rested more on influence than merit.

The courts disagreed. The Delhi High Court dismissed his challenges. The Supreme Court dismissed them again.  Relentlessly,  he returned. The litigation travelled between courts with the persistence of a ping-pong ball determined to outlive both paddles.

What followed was less a legal dispute than a contest of endurance. The courts possessed authority. Nedumpara displayed persistence. Neither side seemed willing to concede.

2. THE FURIOUS JUDGES

The relationship between Mathews Nedumpara and the higher judiciary was never destined to be a peaceful one. Judges value decorum. Nedumpara was ready to skip decorum when he felt a  confrontation was in order. Judges expect arguments to remain within the boundaries of the case before them. Nedumpara has often preferred to widen the battlefield until it encompassed the entire judicial system. The collisions were inevitable.

Among the most notable occurred in March 2019 before a bench comprising Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman and Justice Vineet Saran. The proceedings concerned allegations of nepotism and favoritism within the legal profession. During his submissions, Nedumpara brought in the name of distinguished Senior Advocate Fali S. Nariman, father of Justice Rohinton Nariman.

The reference did not go down well. Justice Nariman observed that several judges had close relatives practising law, including members of his own family. The selective mention of his father, he felt, was intended not to advance the argument but to personalize it. What Nedumpara regarded as evidence, the judge regarded as provocation to ‘browbeat him.

To understand the sensitivity of the exchange, one must appreciate the extraordinary career of Justice Nariman himself. Few judges have travelled a more august path to the Supreme Court.

He joined the Supreme Court Bar in 1979 at the age of 23 after a degree from Haravard and a stint in marine law in New York.  He was designated a Senior Advocate at the unusually young age of thirty-seven—well below the age at which advocates were ordinarily considered for that distinction..  He  served briefly as Solicitor General of India, and in 2014 was elevated directly from the Bar to the Supreme Court. Before him; only six judges were thus directly elevated to the Supreme Court – no doubt, in consideration of their merit. (Lat3er, however, 11 more ‘Bar Judges‘ were so elevated under the Modi dispensation.  

To Nedumpara and his supporters, such a career illustrated the privileges available to the legal elite. To his admirers, it illustrated exceptional merit. The disagreement was never merely personal. It reflected two competing views of the legal profession itself.

The dispute eventually culminated in contempt proceedings. 

In 2019, The The bench of CJI Nariman found Nedumpara guilty of criminal contempt and imposed a sentence of three months’ simple imprisonment, while also prohibiting him from appearing before the Supreme Court and the Bombay High Court for one year. The sentence of imprisonment was suspended after he tendered an apology. 

Yet even that did not bring the controversy to an end. The court also took note of letters sent to constitutional authorities and members of the judiciary containing allegations against sitting judges. These communications generated a second wave of contempt proceedings involving three of Nedumpara’s associates. While the Covid pandemic intervened and altered the practical course of events, the message from the court was unmistakable: criticism of judgments would be tolerated; attacks upon the institution itself would not.

Justice Nariman retired in 2021, lauded across the legal profession and the Bar for his scholarship and independence.

The pattern repeated itself.

In July 2024, during the heated hearings concerning the NEET-UG controversy, an exchange with Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud ended with security personnel being directed to escort Nedumpara from the courtroom. Even while complying, he continued to argue.

One suspects that if a future historian were asked to identify the defining characteristic of Mathews Nedumpara, he would settle upon a simple phrase: He never left quietly.

There was, however, another rebel whose path briefly intersected with his own.

The case of Justice C. S. Karnan.

Karnan was made a judge of the High Court by the  Chief Justice of Madras High Court with the lofty ideal of  recognizing the rights of the so-called lower castes to reach the higher echelons of the judiciary as a matter of  positive affirmation for the downtrodden. The Collegium agreed. Both were to regret this particular instance of idealism later.

If Nedumpara challenged the judiciary from outside the Bench, Karnan attempted the same feat from within it. His allegation was shabby treatment by his peers and the Chief Justice on account of his caste.

Appointed initially to the Madras High Court and later transferred to the Calcutta High Court at the request of a flustered Chief Justice, Justice Karnan became increasingly vocal in alleging discrimination, favoritism and corruption within the judicial establishment. His conflict with the higher judiciary escalated from complaint to confrontation and finally to open warfare.

In 2017, he circulated allegations against a number of serving and retired judges. The Su[reme Court ordered an enquiry and  restrained Karnan from exercising judicial powers. Unfazed,  Karnan responded in a manner without precedent in Indian legal history. He purported to place the Chief Justice of India and several Supreme Court judges on trial and purported to sentence them to 5 years of rigorous imprisonment

The Supreme Court, displaying considerably less imagination and sense of humor, sentenced him instead. Justice Karnan received six months’ imprisonment for contempt of court – the maximum punishment prescribed in the Act for the offence. Karnan briefly went underground before being arrested and lodged in the Correction Centre at Calcutta.

History has produced many judicial rebels. Very few have attempted to imprison the Supreme Court before the Supreme Court imprisoned them.

Not surprisingly, Mathews Nedumpara appeared as counsel in Karnan’s defence. Revolutionaries, even unsuccessful ones, often recognize one another.

The conflict between Nedumpara and the judiciary might have ended as merely another chapter in the long history of lawyers annoying judges and judges disciplining lawyers.

Then came a metaphor:  Cockroach.

CJI SURYA KANT AND THE COCKROACH

Lawyers challenge judges. Judges rebuke lawyers. Both sides write their own version of history. The public promptly forgets.

This time, however, things took an unexpected turn. 

A metaphor escaped from the courtroom. Cockroaches for jobless students.

On 15 May 2026, during yet another hearing involving Mathews Nedumpara, Chief Justice Surya Kant delivered a sharp oral reprimand. The litigation had by then travelled repeatedly between courts. The advocate remained as persistent as ever. The judges on the bench appeared increasingly exasperated.

Then came the words that neither side could subsequently control.

““….. There are youngsters like cockroaches, they don’t get any employment, they don’t have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, some of them become RTI activists, some of them become other activists, and they start attacking everyone… And you people file contempt petitions,” 

Whether intended literally, figuratively or rhetorically is beside the point. History is full of remarks whose consequences far exceeded the intentions of the speaker.

The statement travelled beyond the courtroom within hours. Legal news portals reproduced it. Newspapers reported it. Social media amplified it. By nightfall, a judicial metaphor had become a national controversy.

The reaction was immediate because the remark touched a raw nerve.

India’s young people were already wrestling with unemployment, shrinking opportunities and a succession of examination scandals. The repeated leakage of question papers, cancellations of tests and allegations of institutional incompetence had left many students angry and disillusioned. A few had committed suicide. For years they had been told that education was the path to advancement. Increasingly, many felt that the path itself had been dug up and sabotaged.

Against that background, “cockroach” was not heard as a metaphor, but as an insult.

The name-calling  was not uttered by a politician at a campaign rally or an anonymous social-media provocateur seeking attention. It came from the occupant of the highest judicial office in the Republic. That fact alone multiplied its impact. Commentators quickly noted another uncomfortable aspect of the episode.

Throughout history, powerful institutions have often described troublesome people using the language of infestation. Vermin. Parasites. Cockroaches. Such words do more than insult. They diminish. They reduce human beings to disgusting nuisances. The vocabulary has a long and unhappy history. That is why the reaction was so intense.

Within hours, thousands of young Indians were asking a simple question: If unemployed youth are cockroaches, what exactly does that make the system that produced them?

The controversy grew so rapidly that Chief Justice Surya Kant clarified his remarks the very next day. He expressed pain at what he described as misreporting and insisted that his comments had been directed not at India’s youth but at individuals who entered professions with fraudulent qualifications (a anew revelation that demanded  the urgent attention of the Court)  and then sought to attack institutions. He spoke warmly of India’s young people and described them as the pillars of the nation’s future.

The youth barely paid attention to that clarification. If they did, to them it didn’t ring true.

What was unusual was the spectacle itself. Judges are expected to speak through their judgments. Politicians explain what they meant after the event. The two professions occasionally overlap, but not usually in public.

The ‘Cockroach’ was never intended to become the defining feature of the hearing.

3. THE WOKEN COCKROACHES

Although the Chief Justice of India inadvertently supplied the name “Cockroach”, it was a research scholar at Boston University who gave it political life.

His name is Abhijeet Dipke, aged thirty. He received his baptism in politics while working with AAP founder Arvind Kejriwal. Before leaving for Boston, he served as Kejriwal’s communications consultant, using memes and satire as political weapons. Those skills would soon find an altogether different battlefield.

He christened his movement the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP).

The name might have sounded absurd, even comic, to many. It bared it teeth at India’s holy cows. It struck a raw nerve among thousands of young Indians. What had begun as a judicial metaphor was rapidly transformed into a political identity.

Sensing the mood of an increasingly angry generation, Abhijeet wasted no time. He took to Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. Within days, his Instagram posts had attracted nearly twenty million views, while his messages on X, which were viewed by tens of thousands. A visibly nervous government sought and obtained the blocking of CJP’s content on Instagram and X. Facebook, however, continues to carry photographs and reports of the demonstrations.

Had the movement remained confined to memes and social media, the Cockroach Janata Party would probably have enjoyed its fifteen minutes of fame before disappearing into the digital graveyard that holds yesterday’s outrage.

Instead, Abhijeet and his colleagues did something more ambitious.

They drafted a Manifesto, accompanied by a short set of Criteria for joining the movement.

Recognizing the need for an immediate and attainable objective, they concentrated their campaign on securing the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, under whose watch three major national examination paper leaks had occurred.

The manifesto was assembled in haste. It was occasionally naïve, frequently humorous and often sharply pointed. It bore all the unmistakable marks of youthful impatience: little reverence for established institutions, an appetite for exaggeration, subtle allusions to governmental corruption, and a refreshing refusal to speak in the carefully sanitized language of professional politicians.

Some of its demands were plainly satirical. Others addressed issues that had troubled Indian public life for decades.

Its language was youthful, irreverent and tinged with sarcasm, yet its grievances were unmistakably clear.

What distinguished the movement from countless online campaigns was its decision to identify a specific target. That target was Dharmendra Pradhan. The central Minister of Education in Modi government,

To the protesters, repeated examination scandals, leaked question papers and cancelled tests were not isolated administrative failures. They were symptoms of a system that had grown corrupt and indifferent to the aspirations of millions of students.

The demand for the Minister’s resignation quickly became the movement’s rallying cry. Demonstrations appeared in several cities.

The largest and most persistent emerged at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. The choice was symbolic. For generations, Jantar Mantar has served as the Republic’s designated safety valve—a place where citizens are permitted to shout at power while remaining safely within sight of it. The name itself, derived from the eighteenth-century astronomical instruments built there, is commonly translated as “instrument of calculation.” The young protesters gave it a more contemporary meaning. It became the place where the rulers could measure the depth of public anger.

The leaders of CJP declared that their agitation would remain peaceful but would continue until Mr. Pradhan resigned.

There were attempts to provoke violence. During one disturbance, someone slapped Abhijeet Dipke. Nobody retaliated. More disturbing was an assault earlier in the week on a CJP protester with an iron rod. The movement demanded stringent criminal action against the assailants, while the police reportedly arrested one suspect.

Governments possess many methods of exhausting protest movements. They can restrict websites, suspend social-media accounts, refuse permissions, and rely upon the public’s notoriously short attention span. They may even be tempted to provoke violence, whether through overzealous policing or by allowing hostile elements to infiltrate peaceful demonstrations. There has been threats, an occasional slap and Abhijeet Dipke received  WhatsApp death threats from anonymous numbers demanding he shut down CJP or join the BJP, threatening murder when he returns to the United States. Such tactics have been alleged before, notably during the farmers’ protests.

Yet the Cockroach Janata Party has already achieved something not easily dismissed. It has transformed indignation into organization.

Its supporters ask neither for money nor favours—nor even for a copy of the next leaked examination paper.

They ask only for fair examinations; equal opportunity; the removal of undue privilege; an end to what they describe as “Godi” media owned by powerful oligarchs; and greater transparency in political funding, particularly where public accountability and taxation appear absent.

For the moment, the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan is merely the first objective. Abhijeet Dipke has made it clear that he sees it as only the beginning of a much larger movement.

There has been threats, an occasional slap and Abhijeet Dipke received  WhatsApp death threats from anonymous numbers demanding he shut down CJP or join the BJP, threatening murder when he returns to the United States.

At the time of writing, demonstrators continue to gather at Jantar Mantar, chanting, “Go, Pradhan, go!” Their numbers, however, are gradually diminishing. The Government remains unmoved. On his fifty-seventh birthday, 26 June, the Prime Minister warmly wished Mr. Pradhan. The Cockroaches responded with a greeting card of their own.

“Happy Birthday. Please resign.”

Will the Cockroach Janata Party survive? I think it has the needed grit. Its life has so far been brief, but history contains many movements that began with little more than ridicule, youthful impatience and a grievance that refused to disappear. India today has no shortage of political, social and economic knots waiting to be untied.

I hope this movement proves equal to the task.

 

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