The Power of Words
August 17, 2026
From the bench of India’s Supreme Court this spring, Chief Justice Surya Kant called some of the country’s young people parasites and likened them to cockroaches. The people he was describing were not in the courtroom, had nothing to do with the case, and could not respond.
Contempt almost always arrives the same way: not as an argument for anyone to defend but as an aside, delivered by someone in power about people who aren’t in the room.
The next day Kant claimed that he had been misquoted. But by then the word had traveled, and it landed on a generation already reeling. More than two million young people had sat for the national medical entrance exam earlier that month, only to have it thrown out over a leak. In the weeks that followed, at least 21 students died by suicide, overwhelmed by the pressure. Into that grief came an official description of what they were: not citizens, not somebody’s children, but something undesirable underfoot.
Cruelty rarely begins with a physical act. It usually begins with a word.
At the Wassmuth Center, we use a model called the Spiral of Injustice to make sense of the sequence. The Spiral traces how cruelty moves from language to avoidance, then to discrimination, violence, and finally elimination. The stages all connect. An insult and an atrocity are just different points along the same path.
Calling people vermin is one of the oldest warning signs on this path. Long before the trains ran to death camps, Nazi propaganda described Jewish people as parasites, rats, and lice. Half a century later, and a continent away, Hutu extremists in Rwanda were calling Tutsis inyenzi — cockroaches. That word had circulated for decades. In April 1994, radio announcers used it to send neighbors toward their neighbors’ houses. Eight hundred thousand people were killed in a hundred days.
Consider what a word like “cockroach” accomplishes. An exterminator does not have to hate. He just needs to know what he is dealing with, and then the work is not cruelty but maintenance. That is the labor a single noun performs: it turns a moral question into a household chore.
This does not mean every insult leads to catastrophe. Most cruel words do not go further. But injustice has patterns, and patterns can be interrupted. Each stage gives us a chance to step in. And stepping in can’t just be the work of those who have been targeted. A dehumanizing word loses its power fastest when the people it was never aimed at refuse to repeat it, refuse to laugh, refuse to let it stand.
In India, the refusal took an unexpected form. The day after the judge’s remark, Abhijeet Dipke opened a satirical platform for, as he put it, “all the cockroaches out there.” He called it the Cockroach Janta Party. Hundreds of thousands of people signed up under a simple slogan: Main Bhi Cockroach — I too am a cockroach.
By summer, young people wore cockroach masks and held cardboard signs declaring COCKROACH. Reclaiming the name gave a scattered, heartbroken group a way to find one another. What followed was slow, exhausting work: sit-ins, marches, hunger strikes, demands repeated until they could not be ignored. What they asked for was not complicated: an exam system that could not be bought, and someone accountable when it was. In late July, after weeks of pressure, the country’s education minister resigned. One demand was met. One turn of the Spiral was pushed back.
Dehumanizing language does not need a supreme court or a state radio station. It travels through hallways, social media feeds, and public meetings. It sounds like a nickname that follows a kid from one grade to the next. It is a label slapped onto a neighbor while everyone else stays silent. This is why we teach the Spiral of Injustice — so that all of us can recognize the first sign while it is just a word, and interrupt it before it becomes anything worse.
When a word is meant to make a person feel small — whether it is aimed at a neighbor or at us — we can let it pass, or we can name it and hand it back. That choice is part of how just and joyful communities take shape: one refused insult, one defended neighbor, one name at a time. Because a human being is never vermin. Never disposable. Always a person of dignity — someone who matters.