When Political Vocabulary and Institutional Spaces Normalise the Dehumanisation of Opponents

Politics and history repeatedly demonstrate that language is never innocent. Before discrimination becomes policy, it first becomes vocabulary. Dehumanisation begins with metaphors. Citizens cease to be individuals with grievances and rights; they become pests, infiltrators, parasites, freeloaders, or now “cockroaches.” Such labels strip people of individuality and convert disagreement into moral contamination.

What was once considered unacceptable in public life gradually became routine political vocabulary. Terms such as “parasites,” “termites,” and other forms of dehumanising labels entered mainstream discourse. Political disagreement ceased to be ideological. The opponent was no longer merely wrong – he or she was portrayed as dangerous, impure, or socially undesirable.

The deeper concern today is that this political culture has now travelled beyond electoral politics and appears to be permeating other institutional spaces, including sections of public discourse around the judiciary and governance. The use of metaphors such as “cockroach” for critics, NGOs, activists, or unemployed youth reflects a larger democratic decline.

The animalistic metaphor is not merely a rhetorical excess – it is a politics of moral exclusion. Its message is that the grievances of the targeted group do not quality for register of justice; they belong to the register of pest control. When Maharashtra’s chief minister Devendra Fadnavis compared the opposition to ‘wolves’ or when Akhilesh Yadav likened the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) symbol to an elephant taking too much space, the intent was to shrink the moral standing of the opponent.

This shift is significant because institutions derive legitimacy not only from constitutional authority but also from language and conduct. Democracies survive on disagreement, but they weaken when disagreement is framed as contamination. Once citizens are described through imagery associated with pests or infestation, the moral distance between exclusion and suppression begins to narrow.

History repeatedly shows that dehumanisation begins not with violence but with vocabulary. Before societies legitimise discrimination, they first legitimise ridicule. Language prepares the ground for exclusion by stripping people of individuality and dignity. Citizens cease to be persons with rights and grievances; they become labels.

The irony is particularly sharp in the context of unemployed youth and civil society groups. In a society facing rising anxieties over jobs, inequality, pollution, and institutional distrust, these sections should have been engaged through dialogue and reform. Instead, frustration is often caricatured rather than understood.

It is in this atmosphere that satire emerges as democratic resistance.

The fictional formation of a “Cockroach Janta Party” becomes an apt political satire of our times. The symbolism is powerful because satire reverses humiliation. Those who are mocked reclaim the insult and transform it into political commentary.

The cockroach, in this satire, no longer symbolises dirt; it symbolises survival. It represents the ordinary citizen who survives every economic crisis, every political transition, every institutional failure, and every moral lecture delivered from positions of power.

Its imagined slogan could well be: “You may insult us, ignore us, and caricature us – yet we survive.”

The satire becomes sharper because it exposes a dangerous inversion in democratic culture. Political discourse increasingly rewards aggression over civility. Public humiliation becomes performance politics.

The original concern in “Dehumanising Language: A New Low in Politics” written in the book, “The Idea of New India”, was that coarse political speech was eroding democratic ethics. Today, the challenge appears even larger. Dehumanising language is no longer confined to politics; it risks becoming part of a wider institutional culture.

And once contempt acquires legitimacy, democracy itself begins losing moral depth.

The real danger, therefore, is not merely a bad metaphor. It is the normalisation of a mindset where citizens are no longer treated as participants in democracy but as irritants to authority.

That is why the “Cockroach Janta Party” is more than humour. It is a mirror held before the Republic.

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