The Indian Express’ latest dispatch on JNU’s rustication of five PhD students, including former JNUSU president Nitish Kumar and current office-bearers Aditi Mishra, Gopika Babu, Sunil Yadav, and Danish Ali, reads like a press release from the vandals themselves, glossing over premeditated destruction of ₹20 lakh taxpayer-funded Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) gates at the Dr B R Ambedkar Central Library.
On 21 November 2025, these students didn’t just “protest”, they premeditatedly armed themselves with scissors, cut wires, uprooted panels, smashed cameras, and intimidated security guards, injuring two female staffers in the process.
- Nitish Kumar led the charge by climbing furniture to dismantle the system;
- Gopika Babu stood triumphantly on the wreckage delivering a provocative speech justifying it;
- Aditi Mishra snipped wires despite pleas to stop.
JNU’s Chief Proctor rightly invoked Statute 32(5) for violence, coercion, and property damage, rusticating them for two semesters (Winter and Monsoon 2026), banning campus access, and fining each ₹20,000, yet Indian Express frames this accountability as mere administrative drama. Look at the title – it already gives the perception that accused is actually innocent.
While other media reports detail the premeditation, injuries, and costs head-on, Indian Express buries the act of violence and vandalism by “reporting the order” alone. The tone of Indian Express article is one of detached, ‘just-the-facts neutrality’ that borders on complicity. It meticulously details the university’s order and less on the students’ actions, but the framing lacks the moral outrage such an incident demands. Where is the foregrounding of the taxpayer’s betrayal? Where is the condemnation of the sheer arrogance that turns a library, a temple of learning, into a stage for wanton destruction?
For too long, a section of our elite institutions has nurtured a culture where such thuggery disguised as ‘protest’ has been romanticized, where accountability is seen as persecution, and where the destruction of public assets is reported as just another “incident” in campus politics.
What Indian Express has done is – elevate “protests” over public property, shielding left-leaning activists from scrutiny while decrying “fascism” elsewhere.
₹20 lakh down the drain but Indian Express is more concerned about the “rustication”. These JNU “leaders,” funded by the same taxpayers they disdain, prioritize anti-surveillance rage over library access for peers. IE’s kid-gloves treatment insults every citizen paying for this elite entitlement.
JNU’s action restores order; media like Indian Express perpetuates chaos by normalizing vandalism as virtue.
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