Sheyril Agarwal, Joyojeet Pal

To cite (Agarwal, S., Pal, J. (2023) Social Media Trolling of Chief Justice Chandrachud: Network Drivers and Narratives. Available online at https://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/chandrachud)

Social media has seen a continued attack on Justice DY Chandrachud, and on the judiciary more broadly. Chief Justices are routinely attacked on social media. In the last five years, at least two Chief Justices have been at the center of significant outrage – SA Bobde for his positions on women farmers and marriage as restitution for rape victims, and Ranjan Gogoi for presiding on a case in which he himself was accused of sexual harassment. However, the current chief justice has been attacked at remarkable levels, to the extent of being the top trending topic several weeks over since the start of his tenure. 

Unlike previous justices, Chandrachud has been attacked on a variety of issues, including both judgments and his public statements. Chandrachud has a fairly visible public profile through his public statements and interviews. Also, unlike his predecessors, Chandrachud has both detractors and a steady stream of supporters and fans who likewise engage topics about him online.

In this document, we examine the content and network characteristics of the attacks on the Chief Justice and court, and comment on what these say about public commentary on the judiciary. We study the discourse pertaining to CJI Chandrachud to understand the projection of the judiciary and his own role in big questions surrounding social change in India.

Methodology

To collect tweets involving discourse on CJI Chandrachud, we searched for tweets that contained either of the hashtags: #NotMyCJI, #CJIDYChandrachud, #CJI or #Chandrachud. We also included tweets that contained the text “Chandrachud” or “CJI”. These were then analyzed to check for false positives, which were removed manually and programmatically. 

We limited our search to tweets authored between 1st January 2023 and 20th April 2023 to capture recent activity, specifically the hearings held in the Supreme court about same sex marriage. 

This yielded us a dataset comprising 753,848 tweets, out of which 116,669 were original posts. For some context, this is an unusually high number of messages related to a single individual in a short period of time. Typically only celebrities or major politicians get this scope of engagement online unless there is a single massive event that precipitates engagement. Instead, what we see in figure 1 below is that multiple dates see a large number of tweets about the Chief Justice. 

Figure 1: Daily timeline of the number of CJI related tweets (Link to interactive plot: https://plotly.com/~sheyril/127/)

We highlight the key elements that help understand the spikes in conversations about the CJI:

1. March 2, 2023: While the tweet frequency doesn’t increase significantly than the average, this day witnessed a huge spike in the number of retweets. We found that this was on account of SC’s ruling on the involvement of the opposition and the CJI for the appointment of the Chief Election Commissioner and election commissioners. This was seen as a victory for the opposition, curbing the freedom of the ruling party in appointing the CEC.
2. March 4, 2023: Popular tweets were centered around a statement made by the CJI about the influence of social media and the spread of misinformation. The majority of tweets we see here are not in support of the sentiment, but rather accuse Chandrachud of being a hypocrite. 
3. March 15-23, 2023: tweets during this period range from posts about the Uddhav vs Shinde Maharashtra legislature hearing and the CJI’s refusal to take a sealed document submission in the OROP case. The Maharashtra legislature hearing raised a great deal of engagement from key influencers on the side of the BJP, who saw the justice as being biased towards Thackeray.
4. April 5, 2023: activity related to a bench led by Chandrachud on 5th April revoked the ban on MediaOne for holding “anti-establishment” views. The MediaOne judgment was seen as a rebuff to the government’s attempt to censor a news organization.
5. April 18, 2023: corresponds to the commencement of same sex recognition proceedings in the Supreme Court which were being broadcasted live.

Most of the above cases were either the CJI taking a position antithetical to the BJP government, or to the general position taken by its supporters. In each of these spikes, we see that digital influencers played an important role, something we address later in this document.

User Polarization and its effect on CJI Discourse

While figure 1. above gives us an idea about the general trend on CJI related tweeting and how it maps to offline events, this section explores how political polarization ties in with how users talk about and criticize CJI Chandrachud. 

We do this by employing two user sets. First, we use Nivaduck, a database of roughly 40,000 Indian politicians on twitter that includes information about the user’s party and state affiliation. We single out the instances when politicians tweeted about the CJI and plot the timeline in fig. 2 (parties with total tweet frequency < 300 omitted). 

Figure 2: Daily timeline of the number of CJI related tweets made by politicians identified through Nivaduck (Link to interactive plot: https://plotly.com/~sheyril/132/)

As we see in Figure 2, the majority of direct political engagement with the issue came from opposition accounts other than during one period of high activity. First, the sudden spikes in activity indicates that members of the same party show coordinated patterns when they tweet about the CJI. Additionally, there is a noticeable difference in the pattern of tweeting for the ruling and opposition parties. 

We see that BJP’s high frequency period coincides with Modi’s tweet commending CJI’s efforts for making SC judgements available in regional languages  Whereas, both INC and AAP follow the general trend (see fig. 2) which are reactions based on offline events. In general, the BJP politicians were largely active only during Modi’s tweet, most of the remaining engagement came from opposition parties, mostly supporting judgments by the CJI.

We also see differences in the tweet content when we consider party affiliation. Figure 3 shows how accounts regularly putting out BJP-leaning content tweeted on Jan 23, right after PM Modi’s tweet lauding the CJI, using similar style and content, quote tweeting pieces from mainstream media that lauded Modi’s move. We see such coordinated activity later as well, but at that point, more negatively oriented towards the CJI. In general from the BJP side, only lower-level politicians, or those who are loosely affiliated such as IT cell volunteers engage negatively with the CJI. 

Figure 3: Tweet samples from BJP affiliated accounts using quoted tweets

Even when there has been an attack by a high-profile BJP politician, it has been worded carefully so as to present carefully worded innuendo, rather than direct aggression. We see this in a message from Kapil Mishra, one of the few confrontations by a major BJP leader.

Figure 4: Message critical of the CJI’s position on gender by BJP politician Kapil Mishra

On the other hand, the tweeting on the CJI from opposition quarters has seen two observable trends. The first has been to congratulate him for the ways in which he has engaged the notion of diversity in judgments. This is important for the federalism debate from the perspective of the states. The first has come around the language issue, the same that got Narendra Modi’s attention, with Chief Ministers lauding the decision. Here we see messages from Odisha’s Naveen Patnaik, and Tamil Nadu’s MK Stalin. Stalin’s message is barely cloaked, as language rights is central to the state’s disenchantment with the BJP government.

Figure 5: Non-BJP Chief Ministers presenting the CJI’s position on languages as a shot in the arm for states rights

The second, more aggressive form of engagement by the opposition is using the Supreme court as a means of going after the BJP. This is done either by pointing to the court and the CJI himself as a source of normative authority with a deeper moral compass, or by using a judgment by the CJI as an affirmation of constitutional intent.

In the former framing, the INC and the AAP have tried to use Chandrachud and his statements as a tool to attack BJP, as we see in figure 6 from representatives of both parties using the CJI as a means to highlight a political argument that is central to their agenda. We see here that a Congress representative raises the issue of the role of Governors in opposition held states, the AAP raising institutional control, and Trinamool raising the issue of the government’s control over the mainstream media and its narratives.

Figure 6: Tweet samples of politicians using the CJI in attacks on the BJP

The normative style of the opposition using the CJI in attacking the government is seen in the celebration of some of the Supreme Court’s judgments as evidence that courts are the only pushback against the government. We see several opposition politicians celebrating the Election Commission verdict, and also parties putting issues they typically get behind, in Figure 7, Congress politicians put forth the demand for the Adani probe as well as a congratulatory message on the MediaOne verdict.

Figure 7: Opposition parties presenting the Supreme Court as a normative alternate source of power to the executive branch

The avoidance of direct negative engagement with the CJI by high-profile politicians is arguably less about contempt of court, and more about maintaining a civil relationship with the court. Despite the ‘feud’ between the judiciary and the then law Minister Kiren Rijiju over the collegium system, ministers have been careful about making direct, incendiary remarks. While the demotion of Rijiju from Law Minister to the Minister of Earth Sciences is largely understood as resulting from his standoff with the judiciary, it is clear from this data that the attacks against the CJI online are more strongly tied to digital influencers who are highly polarized in favor of the BJP.

Figure 8: Instances of digital influencers using ex-Law Minister Kiren Rijiju’s remarks to support their arguments

Polarized Digital Influencers

With the key politicians in parties adopting a vanilla approach in using the CJI mainly to attack each other, rather than the institution of the Supreme Court itself, the major drivers of the social media discourse were digital influencers. Both the aggressive attacks on the CJI and the uncritical admiration of the CJI came from digital influencers.

To understand the political position of influencers, we first populated a list of all the accounts above a threshold of accounts followed (>= 5 accounts) who tweeted about the CJI and were not politicians. We first calculate the polarization score by considering the political accounts followed by a user as follows:

Polarization_following = (A – B) / (A + B)

Where A = Number of accounts followed from BJP, 

B = Number of accounts followed from all political parties except BJP

For a few influencers that followed <5 accounts and to generate a stronger signal, we used another metric to solidify our approach where we consider who the user has retweeted since January 2023 until May 2023. The retweet based score is calculated as:

Polarization_retweets = (A – B) / (A + B),

Where A = Number of times a BJP affiliate account was retweeted by the user in 2023, 

B = Number of times a non-BJP political account was retweeted by the user in 2023

Finally, we took the mean of the two scores to arrive at the final polarization score. 

Polarization = (Polarization_following + Polarization_retweets) / 2 

While this approach is simplistic, it allows us to make an estimation of a user’s political alignment based on a snapshot of their current twitter network and retweeting habits. 

We visualize here the most impactful accounts in moving the discourse around the Chief Justice of India.

Figure 9: Engagement vs Polarisation for Influential Accounts in our dataset (bubble sizes represent number of followers; Link to interactive plot:  https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~sheyril/137)

As we see in the graph above, most of the highly engaged content comes from BJP leaning digital influencers. Additionally, most retweeted users also cater to a relatively smaller audience (following) as compared to other digital influencers or journalist accounts that experience a moderate level of engagement. 

We see in fig. 10, tweet samples from the top digital influencers from which a tonal shift is evident. Radharamn Das (@RadharamnDas), an ISKCON spokesperson who regularly spreads misinformation and islamophobia on Twitter uses whataboutery to attack the CJI to push his narrative of Hinduism under attack. 

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra’s (@Iyervval) is among the most influential in terms of overall impressions, and is second only to influencer Ram Prasad (@ramprasad_c), though his engagement per tweet is much higher. Iyer-Mitra’s approach to attack is to use eloquent language and sarcasm. He proposes multiple times that Chandrachud is a threat to democracy. A consistent theme of attack for Iyer-Mitra is to use Chandrachud’s judgment to offer bail to Mohammed Zubair, a figure largely reviled by the far right in India. The messaging by Ram Prasad is more openly aggressive, with a tone that would arguably be unheard of in reference to public discourse over the office of the Chief Justice, referring to Chandrachud as a narcissist and a clown. Ram Prasad is followed by PM Narendra Modi on Twitter.

A notable commonality between these tweets is that they were posted within a day or two after we see activity relating to the CJI peak in the general discourse (see fig. 1). So while these influencers don’t initiate attacks against the CJI, they can be seen piggybacking on the sudden public interest, and influence the discourse with their inflammatory content.

Figure 10: Tweet samples of highly viral content from digital influencers. 

We then looked at the timeline of tweeting by the digital influencers and found that BJP-leaning influencers were a lot more dominant in influencing the overall narrative, however that the overall quantum of content was relatively comparable. We find that tweets by BJP-leaning influencers were a lot more concentrated during shorter periods of time, compared with those coming from the opposition-leaning influencers, who mention the CJI more consistently through the period. 

Figure 11: Daily timeline of the number of CJI related tweets made by 94 digital influencers who lean BJP (orange) and who lean opposition (blue). Only those accounts with a polarization score of over 66.6% or above towards one side or another are plotted. (Link to interactive plot: https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~sheyril/140/)

Narratives

Discourse pertaining to CJI Chandrachud invites a lot of different communities and with them, their vested interests. In this section, we examine how the different themes in the narrative surrounding the CJI and as an extension of him, the judiciary are framed. Some of these themes are intersectional, meaning we see some overlap, both in the kind of users that post them and the topics they touch on. 

We begin by examining the ways in which tweeting patterns differ for Pro-BJP and Pro-Opposition groups (based on polarization scores) in terms of their tweet content. We identify 16 overall themes of discourse and create a set of keywords that encompass their corresponding theme. Next, we group tweets authored by previously identified digital influencers by performing a simple text match with the keywords. We ended up with 1,617 tweets from pro-opposition accounts and 3,555 tweets made by pro-BJP accounts that fell into either of these categories. Note that this method allows for a single tweet to belong to multiple categories which is permitted as themes can be intersectional. We plot the total tweet frequency and the number of retweets each category receives in figures 12 and 13.

Figure 12: Comparison in Tweeting patterns in terms of tweet frequency for BJP leaning and Opposition leaning digital influencers (Link to interactive plot: https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~sheyril/151/)

Figures 12 and 13 allow us to make a few observations. First, we see that pro-BJP accounts comparatively use religion and anti-liberal based tropes more when talking about the CJI. We explore later in this study the ways in which such tropes are applied to portray CJI Chandrachud as an anti-Hindu/Liberal elite. Additionally, we see that tweets by pro-BJP accounts consistently outperform the Opposition group. It’s possible that the kind of inflammatory and misleading content posted by the Pro-BJP elicits more engagement by accounts holding similar beliefs.

Figure 13: Comparison in engagement received in terms of retweets (weighted by number of tweets) for different narrative types by BJP leaning and Opposition leaning digital influencers (Log Scaled)

To explore the various themes of criticism directed towards the CJI in depth, we take a close look at the highly retweeted posts. We thematically coded them into four narratives that appear consistently in attacks against the CJI.

Anti-Hindu Bias

There are multiple ways in which Chandrachud is presented as anti-Hindu, but the two most common approaches are through direct attacks at his judgments as antithetical to Hindu values, or by calling out his support from liberal or opposition quarters as evidence of his being anti-Hindu. 

Since a number of his widely talked about judgments involve civil or human rights, one of the ways of attacking him is through whataboutery, presenting him as indifferent to cases where members of the Hindu community are seen as under attack.

Figure 14: Tweets portraying CJI Chandrachud as biased against the Hindu community

We see in the wording here that there are either cases taken out of legal context (Joshimath), or with political basis (Shiv Sena hearing) to bring a Hindu angle into the conversation. Chandrachud is framed as an “internal enemy”, akin to the way citizens and public figures with a liberal outlook are undermined in the public discourse.

Tweets of this kind use whataboutery or counter-examples, and vary on a spectrum from dog whistling to explicit islamophobia. Similarly, there is a spectrum of misinformation in these messages, extending from innuendo to explicit and known falsehoods. 

A characteristic of such attacks is the use of specific language, certain adjectives like “secular” are used as gentle snubs, but other terms that are not directly aimed at Chandrachud, but appear in the same tweet referring to someone else are used to cast shade by extension. Here we see terms like ISI, Italian, Jihad, Christian, Islam in messages about the CJI. These tweets underline the notion of the CJI’s antagonism to the Hindu community.

Figure 15: Tweets with loaded language meant to highlight the CJI as aligned with anti-Hindu ideas and individuals

Nepotism

One way of discrediting Chandrachud is to highlight the role of his father, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court himself in his career trajectory. While there can be no doubt that the resources and networks opened doors for him and two men from the same family in the single most important judicial post in the country doesn’t make for a casual coincidence. 

It is also important that nepotism is among the enduring tropes used against the opposition, in large part due to the Nehru-Gandhi family’s dominance of the Congress party in the post-Independence period.

Figure 16: Tweets using the notion of nepotism to attack justice Chandrachud

The use of nepotism as an attack strategy dovetails with another issue, that of Chandrachud’s attitude towards gender. In particular, the recommendation of Saurabh Kirpal, himself son of a former chief justice, BN Kirpal, as a high court judge brought a series of tweets, first around the time that the announcement was first made, and subsequently, whenever Kirpal’s name appears in the news. Kirpal’s openness about being gay is central to the objections to his nomination by the Indian government, as well as the opposition on Twitter. 

The Collegium

The discourse on Nepotism goes hand in hand with campaigns against the collegium system in India, with many calling the system unconstitutional and demanding for government interference in the appointment process. The collegium process, which allows the judges to nominate their own, is a key irritant to the government, since it creates in the supreme court an alternate and relatively independent source of power and authority to the executive and legislative branches.

The tussle between Union Law and Justice minister Kiren Rijiju and the judiciary had at its center a statement he made where he expressed concerns over the system of judicial appointments. The big picture however, is that of state control over the judiciary and such attacks threaten the independence of India’s judicial system.

Figure 17: Tweets attacking Chandrachud and the Supreme court more broadly on the structure of the collegium

The collegium-related messaging typically intersects with “democracy” as a concept, the core of the arguments in these is that the executive, and not the judiciary, should be deciding on judgeships.  

Another angle of the collegium that sees Chandrachud criticized is on accusations of casteism in the Supreme Court. This has historically been well documented, most significantly in George Gadbois’ work, and continues to be an issue with minimal representation from marginalized groups. While Chandrachud himself has made several statements about how India needs reform to reduce caste discrimination, he himself has been called out for propagating the same exclusionary system by keeping reform out of the collegium. 

Figure 18: Tweets attacking Chandrachud on perpetuating casteism

While the typical attacks against Chandrachud come from the right, the attacks on caste issues come from Twitter users with a range of political persuasions, and accounts using hashtags like #Casteist_Collegium and #Ban_Casteist_Collegium to organize themselves online.

International Connections

A powerful means of discrediting a public official is to accuse him of not being sufficiently tied to the realities of the common person. While the casteism accusations serve to distance Chandrachud from marginalized Indians, his international connections, such as having studied abroad, and his espousal of certain global liberal values are presented as being out of touch with Indian values. 

Figure 19: Tweets attacking Chandrachud for being influenced by his global intellectual connections

The CJI’s alma mater, Harvard University, is an ultra-elite institution and a point of convenient attack. More importantly, the attacks here are aligned with an existing set of aggressive social media discrediting of Indians with what are seen as global liberal values, buoyed by a US-based right wing digital influencer, Rajiv Malhotra, who hypothesizes that India is under attack from global left-leaning elites indoctrinated through major US Universities, specifically calling out Harvard. This claim of the CJI being part of a shadowy Harvard-connected elite is tied in with a longer history of conspiracy theories around a closely connected group of elites working towards a global order. These go well beyond India and have buyers in social media-sustained communities around the world seeking to find ways to attack political leaders.

Puppetmaster claims

An extension of the globalist claims is the notion of the CJI operating at the highest levels of Indian society as a puppetmaster. These are similar to puppetmaster claims that have been made on George Soros, and unsurprisingly, Soros appears in messages about Chandrachud as well. 

Here, Chandrachud is presented as someone primarily interested in a power grab, working to both monopolize power in the courts, and by extension, to stretch his influence beyond the remit of the courts. We find that this is done in tweets by juxtaposing him against elected representatives, and pointing out that he is attempting to fray into their territory.

Figure 20: Tweets presenting Chandrachud as attempting to capture power beyond his ambit

The notion of Chandrachud as a puppetmaster is conveyed through language such as “hijacker of constitution” or “a God beyond criticism and reproach”. An example of a tweet that went viral has Chandrachud pictured alongside Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi, to propose that the one among them who had the most electoral success, Modi, was being undermined by scheming by the other two. These attack the CJI personally as a threat to democracy through hashtags like #DemocracyinDanger and #DemocracyatRisk.

Wokeness

The most significant thread of attack against the CJI is built around his liberal values, which are presented as being at odds with the general Indian public.  This theme of discourse has been used extensively by Men’s Rights Activists in India for years, which we have examined in much greater detail here. 

Several judgments in which Chandrachud was involved are seen as leaning towards a feminist interpretation of social rights, including his judgment declaring adultery law in India unconstitutional, the judgment that allowed for women to enter the Sabarimala temple, the judgment to extend equity in the armed forces, and his judgment on sexual harassment in the workplace as an affront on fundamental rights. 

In general, Chandrachud had often been seen as an activist/liberal judge even beyond his verdicts or dissents on issues of gender because of his take on privacy, most significantly his dissent in the Aadhaar verdict, his critique of the government and defense of free speech in the Elgar Parishad case, and his judgment favoring promotions on consequential seniority for candidates promoted on reservation in the BK Pavitra case. All of these together have helped build the notion of Chandrachud as a jurist with a liberal bias, taking values aligned with western notions of liberalism.

Statements made by Chandrachud during the same sex hearings triggered a new series of coordinated trolling online, using a series of hashtags such as #NotMyCJI to denounce Chandrachud’s feminist positions. These arguments add a dimension of “elitism” in order to dismiss “woke” ideas as something only the urban elite care about.

Figure 21: Tweets presenting Chandrachud as attempting to capture power beyond his ambit

Conclusion

In summary, we see a range of attacks on the Chief Justice, rooted first in his history of writing liberal-leaning judgments and dissents. The major drivers and timelines of attacks tend to be around judgments, but also cases being admitted or rejected by the Supreme Court. A widely retweeted message (Figure 22) presents the requests for action against those who trolled the Chief Justice on social media as illegitimate. This message presents two consistent means of attacking Chandrachud, that he is not elected by the people, and in this case, that the attempts to defend him also come from the unelected – Rajya Sabha MPs. The use of the #DemocracyinDanger hashtag reaffirms this construction as rooted in a broader attack against the general public, for what is purportedly justifiable trolling.

Figure 22: Tweets highlighting that demands against individuals trolling the CJI come from Rajya Sabha MPs, who are not themselves directly elected

That the Chief Justice appears to have a liberal leaning to several of his judgments arguably rankles many who lean right. But the more important issue is that purging the Supreme Court of similarly liberal-leaning justices represents an existential thorn in institutional capture by the political establishment. Chandrachud’s tenure will be done next year, but the larger issue is likely the slow ascent through the supreme court other justices who may prove problematic at points where the judiciary is at odds with the elected government.

Acknowledgements: We thank Tanishka Sodhi for her inputs in the writing of this piece. This project was done in collaboration with Newslaundry, a version of this piece is available here.