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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The post Indian Express Whitewashes Vandals Who Broke Facial Recognition System At JNU appeared first on The Commune.

The Kerala High Court’s recent judgment in the case of a 46-year-old beggar seeking polygamy has left many Indians bewildered; both by the facts of the case and the reasoning of the bench. Instead of grounding its decision firmly in the Constitution and the law of the land, the court veered into interpreting the Quran, lecturing on monogamy, polygamy, and Muslim customary law. Last we heard, India was a secular republic and not a Sharia state. But with this judgement, it surely seems there are Sharia courts all around and Sharia law, rather than the Constitution, is what frames the basis of judgements!

If one reads through the judgement, one can conclude that milords have “virtually assumed the theological authority to determine which tenets of a faith are essential to any faith”, as observed by constitutional scholar Rajeev Dhavan.

What Was The Case About?

The facts are stark. A Muslim man who is blind, by his own admission a beggar, marries a second time and intends to marry a third time. When his wife approaches the court for maintenance, the court faces a simple question: Can a man with no means be allowed to evade his responsibilities by hiding behind religious custom? The answer, in any constitutional democracy, should have been a resounding no. Instead, Justice PV Kunhikrishnan embarked on a theological deep dive, interpreting the Quran to conclude that polygamy is an “exception” and that this particular beggar wasn’t following the “true spirit” of the holy text.

The job of the court was straightforward: apply constitutional and statutory law to decide whether a man with no means can shirk his duty of maintenance. Instead, Justice PV Kunhikrishnan chose to interpret the Quran, effectively treating religious scripture, not the Constitution, as the primary authority.

The Taxpayer Subsidy for Religious Choices

The judgment’s implications go further. The court directed the Social Welfare Department to provide the petitioner wives, victims of a man’s deliberate choices, with food and clothing. Wait a minute.

The court’s order effectively creates a perverse incentive: a Muslim man can marry multiple women with zero capacity to support them, and when his wives are left destitute, the state meaning you and I, will pick up the tab.

By directing the state to support the wives, the judgment socializes the costs of one man’s private choices. The message is perverse: a husband may contract multiple marriages without means to support them, while the taxpayer – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian alike is conscripted as a surrogate provider.

This judicial Solomon has essentially declared that when a Muslim man makes personal religious choices, the burden falls on the state and, by extension, on taxpayers who had no role in these matrimonial decisions! Welcome to Sharia Republic!

The husband in this case reportedly earns ₹25,000 monthly through various means including begging. If he possesses the financial capacity to sustain multiple marriages, a right his personal law ostensibly grants, why should the secular state subsidize the consequences? The court has effectively socialized the costs of religious practices, forcing Hindu, Sikh, Christian, and other taxpayers to fund the lifestyle choices permitted under Islamic personal law.

The court’s logic, that a blind beggar cannot be forced to maintain his wife, so society must step in – this is a dangerous inversion of accountability. The man, despite his claim of begging as livelihood, earns enough from various sources to support a modest lifestyle. If he is able to generate income, why should the state, funded by ordinary citizens’ taxes, subsidize his failure to uphold his marital obligations?

The Real “Robots” Would Have Followed the Constitution

The judge notably said, “judges are not robots.” True. But robots would have followed their core programming without deviation. In this case, the core programming for a judge is the Constitution. A truly courageous court would have done two things – upheld the supremacy of constitutional morality over religious personal law, especially in cases involving destitution and gender justice and enforced the husband’s liability by attaching his admitted earnings of ₹25,000, proving that no one, not even a beggar, is above the law.

Instead, the court took the path of least resistance – moralizing about the Quran and writing a blank check on the public exchequer. This judgment sets a dangerous precedent. It tells Muslim men that they can contract multiple marriages without the means to sustain them, and it tells women that their recourse is not against their husband, but a plea for alms from the state.

The Kerala High Court has not delivered justice. It has delivered an Islamic Sharia-compliant sermon, rewarded fecklessness, and punished the common citizen. If this is the new norm, we might as well replace the scales of justice with a begging bowl.

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The post Kerala High Court’s Polygamy Verdict: A Sharia Sermon At Taxpayers’ Expense appeared first on The Commune.