The killing of Gauri Lankesh

#ImGauri The journalist Gauri Lankesh was returning to her home from work, a man approached her in the driveway, his face obscured by a motorcycle helmet. He fired a pistol as she ran toward her house, about 10 feet away. She collapsed before she made it inside. Autopsy reports suggested she had been shot twice in the chest and once in the back. A fourth shot had missed or misfired. The footage from security cameras showed only two men on a motorcycle, including the helmeted shooter, a man about five feet tall, but the police suggested that two other men had also been involved, following the first pair on a second motorcycle.Lankesh, the editor and publisher of a Bangalore weekly, the Gauri Lankesh Patrike, was an outspoken left-wing journalist working in an India that, since the 2014 election of Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as prime minister, has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a reporter. But the BJP is only the most overt face of a Hindu right that comprises more than 30 loosely affiliated organizations. Together, they all subscribe to the virulent brand of Hindu nationalism known as Hindutva, and they have in recent years been associated with activities ranging from lynchings, riots, and bomb blasts to threats of rape, dismemberment, incarceration, and hanging of people critical of them and their sectarian idea of India.ICYMI: Freelancing abroad in a world obsessed with TrumpAccording to the 2017 Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, India ranked 136 out of 180, a position quite out of keeping with India’s image as the world’s most populous democracy. Zimbabwe, before the fall of Robert Mugabe, came in at 127, while Afghanistan, mired in a grinding war, ranked 120th. Since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 43 journalists have been killed in India. The number tallied by the International Federation of Journalists is far higher: 73 journalists killed since 2005. Nine journalists were killed in 2015, one of them allegedly set on fire by policemen working for a politician accused of rape. Five were murdered in 2016. In the cases of 30 journalists murdered since 2010 being tracked by the Indian media watchdog The Hoot, there has been exactly one conviction.But who was Gauri Lankesh? Her assassination made her briefly, startlingly, visible everywhere, a slender figure with short, cropped hair, sometimes looking animated and sometimes appearing deeply introspective. Protests and vigils broke out throughout India, under posters and giant, colorful puppets proclaiming “I am Gauri.” Within a month of her death, her work had been posthumously granted the Anna Politkovskaya Award, named in honor of a Russian journalist who was assassinated in Moscow in 2006. By December, Navayana, a progressive publishing house in Delhi, had brought out a collection of Lankesh’s writings and a Bangalore-based singer, Aarti Rao, released “Song for Gauri.” "Gauri Lankesh was an outspoken left-wing journalist working in an India that has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a reporter." One understands why people might have responded in this way: Lankesh’s life lends itself easily to the dramatic, a biopic, a novel, a narrative illustrating through a single, individual portrait the tectonic shifts of a vast, populous country. It is important to remember that her struggle was connected to a larger reality, in life and in death, beyond even the apparent serial assassination of critics of Hindutva. Lankesh was dangerous to a Hindu right that, in spite of its vigorous claims to represent a majority, remains keenly aware of how recent its widespread dominance is.Yet the fact remains that while Lankesh’s work was known to, and admired by, those connected to progressive politics and causes in India—people critical of Hindu nationalism, crony capitalism, sexism, and casteism—it was largely invisible beyond those realms. This was particularly true in the domain of national television and print media, outlets that seesaw between tawdry consumerism and rancorous nationalism, between retreating into strategic silence on controversial matters of the day and actively cheering on the right-wing politics of the BJP and its various vigilante armies.Lankesh, who grew up in Bangalore, worked for The Times of India, the nation’s largest daily newspaper, in the mid ’80s, first in her home city and then in Delhi. She returned to Bangalore in 1989 and began reporting for Sunday, a now-defunct English-language magazine, before switching to Kannada-language television in the late ’90s. Kannada was not a language she was initially comfortable in, according to her friends and associates, a detail of some significance because her father P. Lankesh, a polymath who was a literature professor, poet, playwright, filmmaker, and publisher of a weekly tabloid called Lankesh Patrike, was a well-known figure in the world of Kannada letters. The Lankesh Patrike did not accept advertisements, and it expressed what the Kannada-speaking journalist Krishna Prasad, former editor of the newsmagazine Outlook and writer of the incisive media and politics blog, Churumuri, described to me as an “eclectic world view,” erudite and literary while also being political and punchy.When Lankesh’s father died in 2000, she and her brother, Indrajit, took the paper over, the editorial duties going to her while he became the publisher. (Their third sibling, Kavitha, a filmmaker, did not take a role at the paper.) This new responsibility involved a significant transition for Lankesh, not only in her beginning to write in Kannada and her first position as an editor, but also, Prasad notes, a shift in focus from the urban, fluffy issues dominating the corporate English media to rural issues that involved a more critical, engaged kind of journalism. In an interview she gave shortly after she took over the post, she said she had deliberately distanced herself from the weekly while her father was running it “because it is such a strident, hard-hitting paper, and I was working for the mainstream English media.” She added that she had been stagnating in English-language journalism, while her slightly cryptic references to “being alone” and “personal confusions” also hinted at the difficulty of being a single—her marriage to the journalist Chidanand Rajghatta had ended in divorce in the early ’90s—independent-minded woman in a patriarchal, conservative milieu. WHILE SOME SKEPTICS QUESTIONED AT THE TIME whether Lankesh, given her lack of editing experience and previous involvement with the paper, could fill her father’s role, by all accounts, she embraced the transformation. She took an increasingly critical position on what Prasad calls “the upsurge of Hindutva forces of polarization” around the country and in particular in Karnataka. In 2002, she protested the Hindu right’s attempt to claim that the 11th century Sufi shrine of Baba Budan Giri, 170 miles west of Bangalore, where both Hindus and Muslims had worshipped for centuries, belonged exclusively to Hindus. “She courted arrest on the streets during the protest,” says her former husband Rajghatta, who remained friends after their divorce and is now a Washington-based columnist for The Times of India. “She was taking an increasingly leftist stand, always siding with the underdog.”As Lankesh became more involved in political questions, she traveled in June 2004 to the southwestern region of Malnad to attend a press conference held by members of the Indian ultra-left movement variously referred to as Naxalites or Maoists. One of the Naxalites she met there was Saketh Rajan, a former Bangalore classmate and the son of an army officer, a radical who had written histories of Karnataka and worked as an environmentally conscious, muckracking journalist before becoming a guerrilla. Eight months after the meeting, Rajan was dead, shot down in the kind of extrajudicial execution referred to by the police in India as “encounters.” Lankesh wrote an article about the killing. Her brother Indrajit, an occasional filmmaker and television personality who last year officially joined the BJP, citing Modi as the inspiration behind his decision, refused to publish the article, apparently for being much too sympathetic to the Naxalites. Lankesh claimed he threatened her with a revolver. Gauri Lankesh was an outspoken left-wing journalist working in an India that has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a reporter. Photo courtesy of Kavaitha Lankesh. Following the dispute, she left her father’s former paper and decided to start her own, the Gauri Lankesh Patrike. The seemingly minor adjustment in title had a wider significance. It brought into even sharper focus her status as a woman who had positioned herself against the dominant currents in India. Instead of denigrating the Naxalites, she attempted to get the government into dialogue with them. An op-ed she wrote for her paper in 2003, translated and republished by The New York Times in the weeks following her death, talked about the commonality and mutual curiosity of Indians and Pakistanis staring at each other across the heavily militarized border between the two nations. Younger activists who often split along lines of identity and ideology spoke of Lankesh’s successful attempts to mediate between them—leftists, Muslims, Dalits, women, the indigenous—on the basis of their common antipathy to Hindutva and its dystopian blueprint for the future. Rana Ayyub, an independent journalist whose book, Gujarat Files, is an account of her undercover investigation of bureaucrats and police officials involved in the anti-Muslim pogroms of 2002, recalled in an email about her friendship with Lankesh, “She published my book Gujarat Files in Kannada despite the threats and intimidation she was subjected to.” LANKESH WAS THE THIRD JOURNALIST KILLED IN INDIA IN 2017, but not the last. Even as I spoke on the phone to Prasad about her death, he was on his way to Agartala, capital of the northeastern state of Tripura, to cover the murder of a cable television reporter who had been killed during a political demonstration. Tripura, like Karnataka, holds assembly elections this year, and the BJP is also a prime contender.In other states on the frontline of armed conflicts between the government and the local population, such as Kashmir and Chattisgarh, it is dangerous to be a journalist even when there are no elections on the horizon. Under the pretenses of protecting national security, soldiers and police personnel (not to mention gangsters and vigilantes) intimidate media critical of government policies with complete impunity. In Kashmir, the government regularly shuts down social media, television channels, and newspapers. Of the 45 attacks on journalists in India recorded in 2017 by The Hoot, six were in Kashmir. In Chattisgarh, where mining companies, encouraged by the state and paramilitary forces, are facing off against indigenous populations and Naxalite guerrilla forces, journalists face dangers ranging from being denied hotel rooms and their phones being tapped to threats and arbitrary arrests by the police.Journalists, however, are not the only ones under threat, as the killings of Kalburgi and the rationalists make clear. Sometimes, it appears as if the enemy is information itself, along with transparency, exposure, critical thinking—anything and everything that might be seen as characteristic of a free, open society. In the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, in a scandal involving admission to medical colleges that implicated the top BJP officials in the state, including the chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, more than 40 whistleblowers, accused, and witnesses—doctors, medical students, policemen, and civil servants—turned up mysteriously dead over a period of three years. Ironically, national media took notice of the case, known as the Vyapam scam, only in 2015 when Akshay Singh, a television reporter investigating the death of a 19-year-old medical student—a death that had been passed off by the police as a suicide in spite of the strangulation marks on her body—himself collapsed and died in the middle of an interview with the student’s family.The Vyapam deaths, at least, sparked a brief phase of outrage within India’s mainstream media. But this was an exception. More recently, the national media has largely refused to touch two recent stories involving Amit Shah, president of the BJP and Modi’s consigliere. In October, The Wire reported that a company owned by Shah’s son, Jay Shah, had increased its revenues from approximately $780 in 2014/2015 to $12.5 million the year following Modi’s election. A year later, the company ceased business altogether. Their scoop received scant attention from other English and Hindi outlets.The same was true of an article in the Delhi-based magazine Caravan in November 2017 about the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Brijgopal Harkishan Loya, a 48-year-old judge. Apparently a healthy man, Loya was said to have died suddenly of a heart attack on December 1, just weeks before he was scheduled to try Shah in a case about an extrajudicial execution that had taken place in Gujarat under his watch as home minister. An unknown functionary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Organization (RSS), the mass organization that serves as the fountainhead of the Hindu right, helpfully turned up out of nowhere to contact Loya’s family and explain that the body was being sent to them for funeral rites. Less than a month later, Shah was acquitted by the judge who took over the case from Loya.