The News Minute’s latest “Let Me Explain” video sounds like a hagiography. It presents retired Justice S. Muralidhar as a courageous judicial warrior – a man unjustly transferred, unfairly denied a Supreme Court seat, and now bravely exposing Israeli “brutality” as chair of a UN Commission of Inquiry.
What The News Minute conveniently omits is that Justice Muralidhar is left-leaning person whose public record reveals a consistent ideological bias. His UN report on Gaza, splashed across headlines, is not impartial jurisprudence – it is the predictable output of a judge whose political sympathies have been evident throughout his career.
The News Minute wants you to believe this is about human rights. It is about public relations. A retired judge using a UN platform to rehabilitate his image while delivering exactly what the anti-Israel global left wants to hear.
The News Minute known for its left-liberal editorial bent is now running PR for Justice Muralidhar because he is ideologically aligned with their own leftist worldview. What they present as independent journalism is actually a mutual admiration society – one leftist outlet celebrating a leftist judge whose UN report conveniently serves the global anti-Israel narrative that both enthusiastically endorse.
The Cases The News Minute Conveniently Forgot
The News Minute lists Muralidhar’s “landmark” judgments – the Naz Foundation ruling, the Sajjan Kumar conviction, the Hashimpura massacre case. Impressive, yes. But what about the cases that reveal his ideological leanings? What about the judgments that made the government desperate to transfer him?
Blocking Arrest Of Bhima Koregaon Activist
In 2018, Justice Muralidhar led a Delhi High Court bench that quashed the transit remand of Gautam Navlakha, an activist arrested in the Bhima Koregaon violence case under the stringent UAPA. Navlakha was accused of anti-state activities linked to Maoist violence. Muralidhar intervened aggressively, ruling that the state had failed to provide proper documents. National security commentators viewed this as judicial overreach – a judge bending over backwards to protect a left-wing activist accused of plotting violence.
The government did not press for his transfer out of nowhere. Reports later confirmed that this specific judgment caused the Union Government to repeatedly press the Supreme Court Collegium to move him. The News Minute frames this as persecution. It was accountability.
The Ayodhya Verdict: Undermining a Historic Consensus
Following his retirement, Justice Muralidhar edited a book titled [In]Complete Justice: The Supreme Court at 75. In promotional interviews, he publicly questioned the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya verdict – one of the most significant and consensus-building judgments in Indian history.
He argued that using Article 142 to award land to one party in the Ayodhya dispute, despite finding the demolition of the mosque illegal, did not align with conventional legal frameworks. This is not neutral legal analysis. This is a retired judge undermining a historic verdict that settled a centuries-old dispute.
Anti-Conversion Laws: Calling Constitutional Safeguards “Anti-Choice”
In March 2025, Justice Muralidhar strongly criticized anti-conversion laws in India, calling them “anti-choice” and arguing they undermine individual freedoms. Speaking at a panel organized by ADF India, he declared that these laws “are not so much a law against forced conversions, but are laws against the freedom of choice.”
He claimed there is “a presumption in all these laws that if a person belonging or born into a certain religion decides to embrace another religion, then such a decision must be due to some kind of intimidation.” He argued that laws protecting vulnerable communities from predatory conversion tactics place an unfair burden on those accused of facilitating conversions.
He went further, claiming that “a Dalit seeking to embrace Buddhism will now have to explain to a district magistrate why they are making that choice”—as though transparency in religious conversion is an affront to human dignity. He even suggested these laws “hit at the freedom of choice, freedom of privacy, choice of religion… the choice of dress, the choice of food, the choice of prayer.”
This is not constitutional jurisprudence. This is a retired judge parroting the talking points of missionary organizations and left-wing activists who oppose any legal framework protecting Hindus from conversion tactics. Anti-conversion laws exist precisely because forced and fraudulent conversions are real, especially targeting vulnerable Dalit and tribal communities. Muralidhar’s dismissal of these safeguards reveals his ideological blind spot.
Reproductive Rights: Progressive or Overreaching?
The News Minute celebrates Muralidhar’s rulings on reproductive rights as pioneering. What they don’t mention is that his expansive interpretation of bodily autonomy was heavily contested by socially conservative factions within government departments who argued it overstepped traditional family laws and state guidelines.
His rulings declaring that “reproductive choice is a fundamental facet of a woman’s right to privacy and dignity under Article 21” went far beyond existing legal frameworks. While progressive civil liberties groups hailed him, critics argued that a judge should interpret the law, not rewrite it according to his personal ideology.
The Communist Connection and Left-Wing Sympathies
In October 2021, during a commemorative legal lecture, Justice Muralidhar remarked that the historical contributions of left-wing and socialist lawyers to Indian constitutional law have not been well-documented or acknowledged enough. He noted that “all legal ideologies should be welcome” and that public interest work done by left-leaning lawyers “shouldn’t be shunned.”
These observations can make one classify him as ideologically sympathetic to the left. The News Minute ignores this entirely. They present him as a neutral arbiter of justice when his own words reveal a man who believes left-wing legal activism has been unfairly marginalized.
The UN Report: PR Exercise or Impartial Inquiry?
Now we come to the Gaza report. Justice Muralidhar presents findings that “more than 20,000 Palestinian children were killed” and accuses Israeli forces of “deliberately targeting” children. The News Minute presents this as devastating evidence of Israeli brutality.
But here is the question The News Minute refuses to ask: Is a retired Indian judge with documented left-wing sympathies, who has publicly criticized India’s anti-conversion laws and undermined the Ayodhya verdict, truly the right person to lead a “neutral” UN inquiry into Israel?
The UN Commission of Inquiry has been accused of bias against Israel for years. Its reports are routinely dismissed by Western governments as one-sided. Appointing Muralidhar, a judge whose entire career reflects hostility to right-wing governments and sympathy for left-wing causes, was not a neutral choice. It was a political choice.
The Timing Question: A Convenient Narrative
The News Minute rehashes the old grievance about Muralidhar’s “midnight transfer” in 2020. They present it as proof of Modi government “persecution.” But the Supreme Court Collegium had already recommended his transfer. The government simply implemented it.
The real question is why Muralidhar was never elevated to the Supreme Court. TNM says Justice Madan Lokur claimed the government pressed for his transfer, but Lokur himself retired before the matter concluded. The News Minute does not mention that multiple members of the Collegium resisted these efforts, meaning the transfer happened only after judges who opposed it had retired.
This is presented as a conspiracy. It could equally be read as the judiciary itself recognizing that Muralidhar’s ideological leanings made him unsuitable for the highest court.
The Bottom Line: PR Masquerading as Jurisprudence
The News Minute wants you to believe Justice Muralidhar is a hero – a man punished by a “communal” government who is now exposing Israeli “war crimes” on the world stage.
The reality is more complicated. Muralidhar is a judge with documented left-wing sympathies, a history of controversial rulings that favoured left-wing activists, public criticism of India’s democratically enacted anti-conversion laws, and attempts to undermine the Ayodhya verdict. His UN report on Gaza is exactly what his ideological record predicts – a one-sided indictment that will be celebrated by anti-Israel activists and dismissed by everyone else.
The News Minute cherry-picked the cases that made him look heroic. They ignored the ones that reveal his bias. They presented him as a neutral jurist when his own words prove otherwise. They framed his UN appointment as vindication when it is merely a PR exercise.
Justice Muralidhar is a retired judge with an agenda, using a UN platform to rehabilitate his image while delivering a report that serves the anti-Israel global left. The News Minute’s hagiography is not journalism, it is activism dressed as documentary.
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