This second excerpt from the much-acclaimed book by Rollo Romig, an American journalist (2024) who lived in Bengaluru (Bangalore) and knew Gauri Lankesh, I am on the Hit List, deals with a sombre and chilling reality. Two lists.
Following the bloody assassination of Gauri Lankesh on September 5, 2017, in the lead up to state elections in Karnataka, the right-wing rumour-mill began circulating “information” about 24 murders of so-called members of the supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claiming a moral equivalence to the deaths of four slain rationalists. Romig’s investigations into these claims, evident in this excerpt, not just unravelled the truth but also speaks of the de-humanisation that such equivalence ensures. That was the first list. The second list is more chilling, it was unearthed during the investigations into Gauri’s murder by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) that found two lists of names—the thirty-four people whom the conspirators ostensibly planned or hoped to kill! This included the veteran theatre director and public intellectual, Girish Karnad, the professor and translator, K.S. Bhagawan, Nataraj Huliyar, and CS Dwarkanath both regular contributor to Lankesh Patrike. This excerpt elaborates on this second list too.
The editors are thankful to the author and to Westland Books for permission to publish this excerpt.
CHAPTER 17
The Lists
Vish’s words troubled me. I knew that I could never fully understand all the complex forces at work in a place where I was just a visitor, no matter how much I interviewed and studied and commissioned translations of texts whose languages I couldn’t read. I worried, for one, about the complaint that so many BJP members had thrown at me on my last visit to Bangalore when I asked them about Gauri’s murder: that some two dozen Hindu activists have been murdered in Karnataka in recent years by Muslim fanatics, but that neither the press nor the police care—they care only about Gauri Lankesh. I worried that they were right and that my own obvious biases had blinded me.
During the 2018 state election campaign, the complaints about the twenty- four murders only grew. “Condemn the killing of BJP and RSS workers under Congress rule,” Amit Shah, the president of the BJP, said on an election-season visit to Karnataka. “More than 24 workers have died and the police hasn’t taken any action against the killers. They are roaming around free.” Modi said that the BJP is about “ease of doing business,” while the Congress in Karnataka is about “ease of doing murders.” Many BJP leaders said that all twenty-four were murdered by “terrorists.”
I followed up repeatedly with two BJP leaders who’d told me about the murders when I visited party headquarters in January, asking them to provide me with a list of names so that I could learn more, but neither responded. As far as I could find, an actual list had circulated only once: in July 2017, the legislator Shobha Karandlaje submitted a complaint to the central government with a list of twenty-three men who she said were “Hindu activists” who had been murdered by “jihadi elements.” “IT IS A BLOOD BATH IN KARNATAKA,” the letter begins. Fortunately for me, in February and March 2018, a superb and intrepid reporter for the website Scroll named Sruthisagar Yamunan spent weeks traveling around Karnataka to investigate each of the twenty-three names first-hand. One of the names on Karandlaje’s list, he noted, was ambiguous, and could refer to two different victims, so he investigated both, bringing the total number of cases up to twenty-four. He met with the families of all but one of the men on the list, talked to as many investigating officers as possible, and studied every police report.
Yamunan discovered that the very first man on the list is not, in fact, dead. (To her credit, Karandlaje called the man to apologize for including him after his aliveness came to light.) Two committed suicide. Two were apparently murdered by their sisters. According to police and families, the motives for a majority of the murders were real estate, political, or romantic rivalries. Three of the victims could in no way be described as Hindu activists. Among those who were, some were apparently killed by fellow Hindutva activists or BJP members. Several of the victims’ families made a point of telling Yamunan that they have no problem with Muslims and live in peace with their Muslim neighbours. And several were shocked and unhappy to learn that their loved ones’ names appeared on such a list. “I request people to not join any political party,” one widow told Yamunan; her husband, she said, was a BJP politician whose rival had hired a hit man to kill him. “They will use you and then throw you away.” Many of these non-jihad motives, Yamunan found, were clearly reported in local newspapers long before Karandlaje compiled her list.
In ten cases, Yamunan found, the accused perpetrators were indeed Muslim. All of these perpetrators were linked specifically to a hard-line Islamist organization called the People’s Front of India, or PFI, that operates in Kerala and Karnataka. And most of these ten murders occurred in coastal Karnataka, the region of the state where religious tensions run deepest, especially in Mangalore, a diverse city of around half a million people that’s known as a banking and university centre.
Kavitha told me that in coastal Karnataka the political climate is so fraught that news vendors kept Gauri’s paper hidden, offering it for sale only when asked. “If they kept it out in the stall, the owner would be beaten up,” she said. It wasn’t always this way. Mangalore used to be famous as a cosmopolitan, progressive city. Gauri had a particular admiration for Mangalore’s history of social reform, including an early school for Dalits. The novelist Vivek Shanbhag, who grew up in coastal Karnataka, wrote that decades ago there was a shared sense of community among Hindus, Muslims, and Christians “that words like secularism and tolerance cannot capture.” More apt, he suggested, was the Kannada word “sahabalve,” which literally means “life together.” “Mangalore was a very, very forward looking, very educated place,” he told me. “I can’t believe that it has deteriorated to this level.”
Now Mangalore is perhaps the most religiously segregated corner of the state. A senior police officer who’s served for years in coastal Karnataka spoke to me about the situation on condition of anonymity, given its political sensitivity. In Mangalore, he said, the Muslim population is wealthier and better educated than in most places in India. This actually makes tensions worse, he said, because both Hindus and Muslims feel they are competing directly from positions of strength, and ostentatious consumption on the part of young men from both sides—nice cars, flashy motorcycles—tends to fan resentments. Another source of tension is that the Muslim prosperity is often new wealth, earned at lucrative jobs in the Gulf by Muslim men who in previous generations would likely have been farm laborers for Hindu landowners. And in recent years, both sides have become markedly more religiously conservative. As the Kannada novelist Sara Aboobacker put it, “There is Hindu Talibanisation and there is Muslim Talibanisation.”
In recent decades, the police officer said, especially after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Hindus and Muslims have both built up aggressive religious organizations in coastal Karnataka, each egged on by the growth of the other side. But their memberships consist “mainly of these riffraff boys who had nothing else to do, who had a lot of money, and who didn’t hesitate to commit small crimes or revengeful crimes.” In particular, the PFI on the Muslim side and the Bajrang Dal on the Hindu side would provoke each other: the PFI stealing Hindu cows, the Bajrang Dal attacking Muslim cow transports. The Hindu side became very active with what’s known as “moral policing,” with a special focus on attacking Muslim boys who talked to or merely sat next to Hindu girls. The PFI reciprocated, attacking Hindu boys seen with Muslim girls (although much less often, he said). Often the two sides function simply as gangs, using religion as a cover for turf-based criminal operations, such as land grabbing and illegal sand mining. As they always do, the political parties treat the rival gangs opportunistically: the Congress Party patronizes the Muslim groups just as surely as the BJP patronizes the Hindutva groups. In its early years, Gauri’s Communal Harmony Forum often shared the stage with the PFI and its precursor, the Karnataka Forum for Dignity, naively accepting them as a Muslim rights organization. When the PFI’s culpability in communal disharmony became obvious, the Communal Harmony Forum cut ties with them.
The two sides clash often in street fights, the police officer told me, especially in election seasons. Some of these fights result in murders, and the murders have spun into an endless cycle of revenge killings, “always tit for tat.” A murder that happens in Mangalore today, he said, can usually be traced back in a chain to a murder that happened in 1999. In recent years there have been so many prison murders in Mangalore that the wardens have been forced to segregate Hindus and Muslims into separate barracks. In Mangalore, he noted, these retaliatory murders are never committed with guns, because a gun wound “doesn’t create that violent scene that is required to drive a message. So it is a policy that you actually commit these murders with sharp weapons and make many cuts on the body. The message should be very, very strong, so the brutality should be visible.”
He said it’s certainly true that Muslim fundamentalists committed some of the murders on Karandlaje’s list, and also that those victims have gotten far less attention than Gauri, but the context is completely different. Here, he said, it’s “rowdies trying to eliminate each other.” In 2022, the journalist Johnson T. A. did a study of communal murders in coastal Karnataka and found that most were retaliatory, with an equal number on each “side”; the murdered Muslim activists have gotten just as little popular attention as the Hindutva activists.
Yamunan reported that two of the ten murders committed by Muslims on Karandlaje’s list happened in street fights between Muslim and Hindu toughs at official celebrations of Tipu Sultan, which had become a flash point. Two others were reportedly murdered in revenge for aggressive cow-protection vigilantism (one of whose killers was later stabbed to death in prison with a serving spoon). Some cases blurred the line between religious conflict and gang war. In one case of a Hindu activist murdered by a Muslim activist, police told Yamunan that drug turf was a factor: the victim and perpetrator were both marijuana dealers. In the face of this rowdy, macho, endlessly retributive political violence, the RSS and BJP loudly play the victim without acknowledging that their side commits the same violence, racking up a comparable body count among their opponents. The murders on both sides are outrageous and intolerable. But they are not lynchings, nor are they assassinations of elderly writers on their doorsteps.
When the discrepancies in Karandlaje’s list were brought to her attention, she called it an “oversight” and said that she would release a revised list. She never did, and she was clearly unchastened. A few months later, she raised an even more inflammatory charge. In coastal Karnataka, an eighteen- year-old Hindutva activist named Paresh Mesta was found dead in a lake, and Karandlaje loudly and repeatedly insisted that “jihadi elements” had split his head open, poured boiling oil on his body, cut off his tattoos of Hindu symbols, and castrated him. The post-mortem report showed no signs of assault and concluded that he had slipped into the lake and drowned, most likely because he was drunk.
I feel that I now have the facts about the twenty-three or twenty-four murders that BJP leaders kept insisting that I examine. They were lying about those murders, and they knew they were lying. By constantly arguing in bad faith in this way, they make it impossible to engage seriously with their position. It’s an appalling thing to do.
But I’m also appalled with myself—I just spent sixteen hundred words arguing, essentially, that I should care less about those murders than the BJP thinks I should. I think often of a passage from an essay by T. M. Krishna, the renowned South Indian Carnatic singer. “The BJP and company have not only poisoned the minds of their own supporters, they have achieved a larger goal,” Krishna wrote. “They have made the rest of us crass and inhuman to the extent that we are unable to empathise when an RSS member is killed. Of course, this only makes their case for a monolithic Hindu Rashtra stronger and, hence, politically convenient. I know we need to stop this cycle, rediscover empathy, the ethical and sublime, but I do not know how.”
- • •
After the arrests of the first suspects for Gauri’s murder, a very different list came to light. On my previous visit to Bangalore, I’d learned that Indian progressives had developed a habit of talking, often with gallows humour, about the List: an imagined ranking of who was most likely to die next. It turned out that the List was real. In the diaries that the SIT recovered from the arrested men, they found two lists of names—the thirty-four people whom the conspirators ostensibly planned or hoped to kill. The first name on one list was Girish Karnad. The first on the other was K. S. Bhagawan, aged seventy-three, a highly outspoken professor and translator, whom the Sanatan Sanstha often denounced on their websites. devout hindu oruanizations demand immediate arrest of heretic prof. bhauayan! ran one of their headlines in 2015, after Bhagawan declared publicly that Rama is not a god. Two months after Gauri’s murder, police had to escort Bhagawan to safety after a fiery speech he delivered in his hometown of Mysore, a couple hours from Bangalore.
According to the SIT, the conspirators, after killing Gauri, had decided Bhagawan would be their next target. In early 2018, the SIT had been eavesdropping on the phone calls of the first arrestee, K. T. Naveen Kumar, and had at first planned to wait and keep listening in to gain more information on his co-conspirators. But when they realized from his conversations that an assassination attempt on Bhagawan was imminent, they swept in and arrested him.
One afternoon when I was in Mysore, I arranged to meet Bhagawan in the café of my hotel. A cheerful man with a shock of thick white hair, he entered briskly along with a large man in a shiny grey suit. “This is my gunman!” he explained. The bodyguard joined him, he said, in 2015. “I gave a lecture on the Bhagavad Gita, which is said to be a very important document of Hinduism,” he recalled. “Certain portions of the Gita must be burnt, I said. I did not burn them, but I said they should be.” Some people “didn’t like it,” he said, chuckling with delight at the memory. “They attacked my house, pelting stones and all that. Immediately the Karnataka government provided me security. There are three policemen in our house, and one gunman will be always with me.”
“It seems that this group that killed Gauri Lankesh also intended to go after you,” I said.
“But they will not,” he said blithely.
He seemed indifferent to my questions about threats and assassinations; he was more eager to discuss literature and philosophy, which he did with relish. He told me he “developed a critical attitude toward the so-called Hinduism” after reading Kuvempu, the greatest of Kannada poets, who wrote a version of the Ramayana that “removed all these Brahminical values.” The thing we call Hinduism, he said, is nothing more than Brahminism. “I don’t believe in religion,” he said. “I believe in spirituality.”
He talked in detail about his work translating English literature into Kannada, including a number of Shakespeare’s plays; more than once he sent the gunman to his car to see if he could find a copy of one or another of his books. He said that he’s now writing a new analysis of the Ramayana. “Nowhere is Rama an ideal person,” he said. “He was only a killer, killing person after person and branding them as demons.” I told him I didn’t think the stone throwers were going to like that one, either.
M. Kalburgi, he said, “was an intimate friend of mine. Great man. Great scholar. And a true follower of Basavanna.” Gauri, he said, published many of his articles in her paper, and also a book he wrote denouncing the
proposed Rama temple in Ayodhya. “The pity is, those who killed them, they’re all Shudras, non-Brahmins. They all belong to the lower strata of society. You see how Brahminism has brainwashed them. The ideology is given by the Brahmin, but no Brahmin is caught so far.”
After a while we went to his apartment, which is up a flight of stairs, with a terrace outside the door, upon which two uniformed police officers had set up a sort of sniper’s nest, complete with a massive semiautomatic gun laid out on a blanket. The cops rose to their feet as we ascended the stairs, then went back to their distractions from their boring job, one looking at videos on his phone, the other leafing through a newspaper.
I asked Bhagawan if he worried much about his safety. “No, no, no, not at all,” he said. “I feel very happy.” “You seem happy,” I said. “Why don’t you worry?”
“I don’t know,” he said, uninterested in the question. “My worry is about writing only. I must write well. I must read great books. That’s my only concern.” I asked him if his wife worried about his safety.
“No, no, no, not at all, not at all, not at all,” he said. “In fact, she told me, every man is going to die, today or tomorrow. Why worry? You do whatever work you want to do, she said. So, from that day onwards I became completely free of mortal concern. I don’t think about death at all. Death comes on its own. Why should I think of it?”
Girish Karnad also seemed unbothered that he’d topped a hit list. (His son, Raghu, told me later that Karnad was sceptical of these lists.) One well- connected journalist told me that according to the SIT the killers were casing Karnad’s house right around the time I visited him there in January. In August 2018, five prominent left-wing activists and intellectuals were arrested for supposedly inciting a riot; later they were additionally accused of plotting to assassinate Modi. In protest, Karnad attended an event marking the first anniversary of Gauri’s death, oxygen tank on his lap, wearing a sign around his neck that read me too urban naxal. “If speaking up means being a Naxal, then I am an urban Naxal,” he told reporters. “I am proud to be a part of the hit list.”
Others were feeling understandably less defiant. “I want to erase it,” said Nataraj Huliyar, a long-time writer for P. Lankesh’s paper whose name appeared on a list. “I’m afraid my mother might see it.”
Another name on a hit list was that of the lawyer C. S. Dwarakanath, who also wrote regularly for P. Lankesh. An armed policeman sits in the foyer of his office to protect him. A thoughtful, gentle man, Dwarakanath told me that as a student he was actually an RSS member, but Lankesh transformed him. Now his hero was Ambedkar, the author of the Indian Constitution and the prophet of Dalit liberation. He suspected that he was being targeted for a lecture he delivered in Mangalore that was critical of the proposed Rama temple in Ayodhya. There was an uproar when he said that nobody knows where Rama was born or his date of birth—but he was merely quoting the text of a Supreme Court ruling. His point, he said, was that “Rama is in the heart of the people. Don’t impose any Rama on them.” He cited the great mystic poet Kabir, who wrote that there were four Ramas: the first is on the throne of Ayodhya, the second is in the heart of every human, the third is in every particle, and the fourth is beyond human comprehension. “That was my argument,” he said. “They never understood it, because their minds are blocked.” (Bhagawan, he thought, spoke too harshly. “Some people have a very good opinion of Rama and Sita,” he said. “We should not hurt their feelings.”) He used to appear regularly on TV debates, but now that he’s on the hit list, his family won’t let him.
The police told Kavitha that Gauri was “a great soul” because her death had prevented all those people on the hit lists from being killed. “That makes you feel her death didn’t go in vain,” she said.
Note: The book which has been widely reviewed including by the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus and Tribune India was also a 2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for General Nonfiction. The. The Pulitzer Board called it “a captivating account of a crusading South Indian’s murder, a mystery rich in local culture and politics that also connects to such global themes as authoritarianism, fundamentalism and other threats to free expression. Sabrangindia is grateful for permission from the authors and publishers to publish four excerpts, at intervals of the book.
(The first excerpt was published some days ago and may be read here. Parts two, three and four of more excerpts from the book to be also published at intervals)
Note from the Editors: We would like to express our heartfelt solidarity with the family of Gauri Lankesh, Indira Lankesh, Kavitha and Esha Laneksh, who have with pathos and determination built on the gaping vacuum created by Gauri Lankesh’s assassination. Gauri was also a close a dear activist friend of Sabrangindia’s co-editor, Teesta Setalvad.
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Storms battered her from outside, but she stood, an unwavering flame: Gauri Lankesh
Gauri Lankesh assassination: 6 years down, no closure for family and friends, justice elusive