by PARVATHI MENON
Gauri Lankesh in Bangalore on March 21, 2011. Photo/K. BHAGYA PRAKASH
Gauri Lankesh’s killing, though one in a long line of similar killings of secular writers, activists and public intellectuals in recent months and years, represents in some sense a turning point, a new and significant moment in the growing environment of intolerance in the country.
It grieves me to write about Gauri Lankesh in the past tense. The television news flash on September 5 of her brutal murder on the steps of her house in Bengaluru was met with initial disbelief and incomprehension by her large constellation of friends, colleagues, acquaintances and admirers. Stunned, friends called each other for confirmation of the dreadful news and to assimilate its import: the similarities between the killing of the distinguished and outspoken academic M.M. Kalburgi in 2015 and Gauri’s murder; the knowledge that Gauri would also have been in the crosshairs of the same forces for her uncompromising stance against communalism; the enabling atmosphere in the country over the last few years for hate crimes of this sort to be committed. These connections provided tentative answers to the question on everyone’s mind: Why Gauri?
The response to news of her death in Bengaluru and other parts of the country assumed the proportions of a tidal wave of grief, anger and, perhaps, fear too. There is also the growing realisation that her killing, though one in a long line of similar killings of secular writers, activists and public intellectuals in recent months and years, represents in some sense a turning point, a new and significant moment in the growing environment of intolerance in the country. For Gauri is—was—a force in Kannada journalism, having carved out a niche in a special kind of adversarial journalism. She has been on the media scene from the 1980s—first with the English media, and since 2000 in Kannada journalism. Her tabloid, Gauri Lankesh Patrike, an offshoot of Lankesh Patrike which her father started and she took over after his death, is widely read precisely because it offers an alternative kind of journalism.
Gauri adopted her father’s anti-establishment, muckraking tone and style but steered the publication onto a fundamentally new path. She used it as a platform for waging a relentless battle-of-the-pen against the rising tide of Hindutva fundamentalism and its growing hold on India’s body politic. That is why she and her publication incurred the wrath of the Hindu Right. Gauri made no bones about her publication’s bias. She had declared herself an activist-journalist and used every public platform to speak out against communal politics, whether at the State or Central level. She campaigned on the ground and in her newspaper on some of the major flashpoints of communal tension in Karnataka–the Hubli flag-hoisting controversy, the attempt by the Sangh Parivar to convert the Sufi shrine of Bababudangiri into a Hindu temple, and the widespread phenomenon of moral policing by Hindu right-wing groups in coastal Karnataka. She was also active on issues of social justice and women’s rights, though it was unquestionably her anti-communal and secular credentials that she was known for.
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