The Selective Morality of India’s Left-Liberal Camp

Every movement has a mask, and the mask of India’s left-liberal establishment is compassion. It speaks fluently of dignity, equality, women, minorities, the vulnerable. Then a test arrives that doesn’t flatter the script, and the mask slips.

October 2026 gave us three.

The man with the axe above his head. On Flydubai flight FZ1073, a co-pilot attacked Captain Smit Machchhar with a crash axe and tried to seize the controls. Machchhar blocked blows to his head, screamed for help and reached for the knob to open the door. Passengers and a reserve pilot overpowered the attacker, and the plane landed in Tabuk. The UAE called it a terrorist attack.

An Indian bled to save 174 strangers. Modi and Netanyahu hailed him. And the loudest voices on India’s opposition benches, the ones with an opinion on everything from Gaza to gerrymandering? Union ministers noted that Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi had not publicly acknowledged him a full day after world leaders had. The charge is as old as it is pointed: a hero is welcome only when his story serves the right narrative. This one involved an Indian, an Israel-bound flight and an act of terror, and apparently that was not an easy tale to tell.

The professor and the eleven. Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) dismissed a professor, a Congress MP, after an inquiry into allegations by eleven women students. They allege suggestive remarks in viva examinations, advances, and marks offered in exchange for sexual favours. He denies it. But consider the timeline. The students complained in May. A women’s commission acted in September, after a video went viral, and the students said the university had done nothing. Four months. Eleven young women, still sitting in the same corridors as the man they accused.

Now ask where the thundering feminists were. These are the same circles that organise candlelight vigils for every outrage with the right culprit. The BJP asked why Congress’s top leadership stayed silent. The critic’s reading is that “believe women” turned out to be conditional: a slogan for rivals’ scandals, a footnote for allies’. JNU, the self-appointed conscience of Indian progressivism, took months to act on complaints against one of its own.

The couple in Mecca. Saudi Arabia executed two Bangladeshis for “indecent acts” in a mosque, sentenced under ta’zir, a discretionary punishment. The ministry did not say what the act was. Bangladesh was not told in advance and is asking for details. A secret offence, a discretionary death sentence, a government kept in the dark. This is exactly the kind of power that liberalism was invented to restrain. Saudi Arabia carried out 356 executions in 2025, per Amnesty.

If a Hindu priest, a Christian pastor or an Indian state had done this, we would have had a week of op-eds, hashtags and international petitions. Instead, there was a hush from the quarters that profess to speak for universal human rights. The critic’s indictment: the principle was never universal. It was a tool, and tools get put back in the drawer when they might cut the wrong hand.

What binds the three. It is not a conspiracy. Nobody needs a memo to know what is awkward. It is something subtler and more corrosive: a moral reflex trained by identity. The pilot did not fit. The accused professor was on the wrong team. The condemned couple belonged to a faith the movement has taught itself to treat as perpetually under siege, so every abuse committed in its name becomes an unwelcome complication.

Call it what it is: a politics that learned to rank victims by usefulness. Courage that doesn’t serve the story gets a muted nod. Abuse by an ally gets a procedural shrug. Brutality by a protected identity gets a diplomatic silence. And the woke vocabulary, with its “intersectionality” and “positionality” and “privilege,” supplies a ready excuse for each: it’s complicated, context matters, now is not the time.

Context does matter. But a conscience that finds context only when its friends are in the dock is not a conscience. It is a brand.

The cost of all this is not abstract. It is paid by eleven students who waited. It is paid by Muslims themselves, the very people this posture claims to protect, whose real grievances get discredited every time the movement defends the indefensible. And it is paid by liberalism, which was supposed to mean one standard for everyone, and has become a dialect spoken by one faction.

India deserves a liberalism that can salute a pilot without checking his politics or religion, believe a student without checking her accused’s party card, and condemn an execution without checking the executioner’s religion. Until the left finds that spine, its sermons will be heard for what they are: a performance, staged for an audience of its own.