When I was in law school, I knew fairly early that I did not want to be a traditional lawyer. Not because I did not love the law, but because I was much more inclined to write about it, study it, understand how it moved through society and what it did to real people, who sometimes walk into courts and come out reduced to a name in a judgment or a subject of legal doctrine. Legal journalism felt like the version of law that kept the empathy in and so became the path I took. Apparently, according to the Chief Justice of India, that might make me a ‘cockroach’.
On May 15, CJI Surya Kant was hearing a case about a lawyer seeking senior advocate designation when he said, “There are already parasites of society who attack the system and you want to join hands with them? There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment and 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.” I will be honest, I have been called worse. But I have not been called worse by the head of the Indian judiciary while sitting on the bench, so this one does feel worth writing about. And since he mentioned RTI activists in the same breath, let me tell you what one of those actually looks like.
Simpreet Singh was working on housing rights for slum-dwellers in Mumbai when he noticed a thirty-one-storey tower going up on defence land in Colaba, no environmental clearance, inside a Coastal Regulation Zone, with the road in front of it quietly redrawn from 70 metres to 19 metres to fit it in. He filed seven RTI queries which came after six months beyond the mandated thirty days. What came back was a paper trail showing, in chronological order, how each minister and bureaucrat who received a flat in Adarsh Housing Society had been involved at some point in granting its permits. Maharashtra’s Chief Minister resigned. Singh later said that without the RTI Act, quite simply, the Adarsh Housing scam would never have been cracked.
In twenty years the Right to Information Act, 2005 (‘RTI Act’) has done what no press conference or parliamentary question could. It helped frame charges against a telecom minister in the 2G scam, revealed that 744 crore rupees meant for Dalit welfare was redirected to the Commonwealth Games, and exposed that demonetisation was announced before the RBI had formally approved it. And in the hands of sixty lakh ordinary applicants filing every year, it helped a pension claimant in Bihar find out why her name disappeared from a government list, and a farmer in Rajasthan prove he had worked the days he was never paid for. These people, stubborn enough to file the same question twice, then appeal the silence, and then wait, were those who demanded accountability from the system.
There is also a certain irony in these remarks coming from the Supreme Court specifically. An activist named Subhash Agarwal had once simply asked whether Supreme Court judges were declaring their assets to the CJI as required under a 1997 resolution. The Supreme Court’s response was to petition itself challenging the order that said it had to answer. The case bounced between benches for years, a Constitution Bench kept getting delayed, and it was only in 2019 that the Court finally ruled that yes indeed, the office of the CJI is a public authority under the RTI Act. That stubbornness is increasingly all that is keeping the Act alive.
As recently as late 2025, the Central Information Commission was running on just two commissioners, with nine posts vacant and nearly thirty thousand appeals piling up. Many states still continue with huge vacancies in their respective Information Commissions. Petitioners before the Supreme Court argued that the Union government’s refusal to fill these vacancies was effectively “killing the RTI Act.” Appointments have since been made, but only after years of litigation and court monitoring, which tells you everything about how enthusiastic the government is about a functioning transparency regime.
If that is not enough, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 quietly amends the RTI Act to remove the larger public interest exception on personal information. Section 44(3) amends the RTI Act to remove the ‘larger public interest’ exception, which means that personal information is now generally exempt from disclosure, regardless of public interest considerations. The pushback on a citizen’s right to know has only grown.
The Chief Justice provided a clarification a day later that the remarks were misquoted, that the target was specifically people with fake degrees sneaking into noble professions. The clarification is noted but the sentence, as spoken and as heard, named RTI activists and media workers explicitly. But RTI activists do not sneak into anything. They use a law that Parliament passed, that the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld, and that successive governments have spent years trying to quietly hollow out.
Simpreet Singh waited six months for documents the law said should arrive in thirty days. He got them eventually and used them to prove that a building meant for Kargil war widows had been carved up by the officials who signed its permits. This (and countless others like him who hold the State and its institutions accountable to the public) is what an RTI activist looks like. ‘Parasite’, ‘cockroach’, whatever one may refer to them as.
Join us for the launch of ‘The Constitution is My Home’
‘I may not have been one of the founding mothers of the Constitution, but I am one of its founding daughters,’ opens the blurb of our co-founder Indira Jaising’s new book. The book is a dive-in into a life in law that has shaped India’s legal landscape through crucial battles in the Court, from Mary Roy and the fight for equal inheritance to Olga Tellis, which recognized the right to livelihood for pavement dwellers. And if the Sabarimala hearings raise curiosities in your mind, this should be a must read to untangle the knotted questions on faith, justice and discrimination, through the life and mind of someone who has spent decades pondering these questions.
On Thursday, May 21, Indira Jaising launches her new book, ‘The Constitution Is My Home’ at the India International Centre in New Delhi. The evening features a conversation with senior journalist Sreenivasan Jain as the event begins at 6:00 PM. If you cannot make it in person, you can watch the discussion live on The Leaflet’s YouTube channel. Watch it live here. Pre-order, if you haven’t yet.
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