This excerpt, the third in a series of four that Sabrangindia is publishing, looks at the investigation into Gauri Lankesh’s murder and is both instructive and seriously concerning. The editors remain thankful to the author and to Westland Books for permission to publish this excerpt.

CHAPTER 18

The Kingdom of Absolute Truth

On November 23, 2018, the Special Investigation Team submitted a charge sheet accusing eighteen men of conspiring together to murder Gauri Lankesh. By then they’d arrested sixteen of those men. The two remaining men were still at large. The charge sheet was a whopping 9,235 pages in length, a record of all the evidence the SIT had assembled against the men to make the argument that they should be charged with murder: forensic reports, handwriting samples, witness statements, statements from most of the accused, narrative summaries, and much, much more, most of it in Kannada.

Johnson at The Indian Express gave me a scan of the thing when I got back to Bangalore in the summer of 2019, but I needed time to get the relevant parts translated into English. I was especially impatient to read the statements of the accused, in Kannada and Hindi, which alone totaled 255 pages.

There was one long English-language document included in the charge sheet: an entire book, titled Kshatradharma Sadhana, multiple copies of which were found in the suspects’ possession. Its author is Jayant Athavale, the founder and guru of Sanatan Sanstha. Eighty-six pages long, the book is volume 1E in Athavale’s Science of Spirituality series; its subtitle is Spiritual Practice of Protecting Seekers and Destroying Evildoers.

“Violence towards evildoers is non-violence itself,” he assures the reader. “It is a sin not to slay an evildoer…. The sin of killing the undeserving is the same as not slaying one who deserves it.” And for these killings, the law of karma “does not apply”: “Destroy evildoers if you have been advised by saints or Gurus to do so. Then these acts are not registered in your name…. But this is also not registered in the name of the saint or Guru because They both are the manifest forms of God.” The spiritually motivated assassin is sure to succeed. “It does not matter if one is not used to shooting. When he shoots along with chanting the Lord’s name the bullet certainly strikes the target due to the inherent power in the Lord’s name.”

The book is nothing less than a manual for murder in the cause of spirituality. It makes a point of repeatedly clarifying that this is not a metaphor: it is an extended argument for the “physical destruction” of any people whom “seekers” determine to be “evildoers,” complete with many quotations from multiple scriptures, all of them framed in a way that seems to exhort the reader to kill. The book enables murder as an act of goodness.

“Society has been invaded by germs in the form of evildoers. If these germs are not destroyed then the entire society shall be destroyed,” Athavale writes. “In order to protect yourselves it is now imperative to destroy evildoers in society otherwise they will destroy you.”

In typical Sanatan Sanstha style, everything is broken down mock- empirically, complete with multiple tables. “In general, society comprises of 5% evildoers and 10% seekers. The rest of the 85% are passive, self- centered good-for-nothings from the social point of view as they are concerned only about their families.” The “crusade against evil,” Athavale calculates, is 65 percent a spiritual battle, 30 percent a psychological battle, and 5 percent a physical battle.

When a seeker is ready to destroy evildoers, the first thing to do is “start making lists of evildoers.” He suggests consulting the pages of Sanatan Sanstha’s newspaper, Sanatan Prabhat, for inspiration in compiling a hit list, because it publishes “news about evildoings.” When the time comes to kill, the seeker should show no mercy. “Evildoers do not deserve to be pardoned. One should certainly not be moved by the emotional talk of an enemy and should never let him go scot free or pardon him.”

“This subject is quite different from others,” Athavale admits in the book’s conclusion. “Consequently you will probably be stunned. However you should contemplate on the topic then you will realise how essential it is for you with regard to spiritual progress.”

Before anything else, I caught up with Kavitha. We met in her office on the top floor of her father’s office building, a room lined with posters of her own and her father’s films, along with favorites by other directors: Kiarostami’s Close-Up, Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, Kurosawa’s Ikiru, along with Roman Holiday (Lankesh was an Audrey Hepburn fan). She looked stylish in a dark blue kurta and tortoise-shell glasses, and as usual she cried silently and continuously whenever we spoke of Gauri, wiping her tears away with a pink handkerchief.

Since I’d last seen her, she’d released a new film called Summer Holidays—a light, charming adventure about a group of kids who stumble on a mystery and learn a lesson about conservation. It was a family affair: in her film debut, Kavitha’s daughter, Esha, played the lead, alongside one of Indrajit’s sons. Even one of the family dogs had a role. And Gauri appeared in a cameo, which Kavitha filmed two months before her death—as a crusading journalist, naturally. She was still deciding what to make next. “I got a very bad offer for a film that I didn’t like, so I refused to make it,” she said. “Some coming-of-age comedy, four boys trying to lose their virginity. You know how it is. I’m not in that mental state of mind. I mean, if I was twenty, maybe I would have thought of it. I’ve got another idea with two women protagonists. And one more. I seriously want to work on Gauri’s film, actually. A film on Gauri.”

The next day we met at her home in southern Bangalore. Kavitha mentioned that her neighborhood, because it’s well-off, is a BJP stronghold, and she constantly hears her neighbors sing the praises of Modi. Her neighbor across the street stopped talking to her after Gauri was murdered. Esha appeared to say hello, a tenth grader now, bright and polite and seemingly happy. I’d told Kavitha I’d wanted to interview Esha, but in the event I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It didn’t feel right to interrupt a fourteen-year-old’s good mood with a journalistic interrogation about her aunt’s murder. Anyway, I knew how she felt because she’d published an essay about it a few months before. “One of the feelings I have thought about the most is pain,” Esha wrote. “A year has passed but I feel the pain as if it was yesterday. Maybe I am not crying anymore like I was back then, but the void inside me still feels just as deep as it did that day. Initially, I felt very angry towards the killers. I wanted to hurt them the way they hurt her. I wanted them to experience the pain we felt. I still do. But the bitter truth is that my aunt will not come back even if they suffer.”

Gauri had always had a special connection with children; “in her spontaneity, she was like a child,” her friend Mamta Sagar wrote. She kept a stash of little toys to give to friends’ kids when they visited. If someone brought a kid to one of her parties, she’d sit on the floor and devote her attention to them. “She was very genuinely interested,” Vivek Shanbhag told me. “And they loved her, because she was very gentle with them.”

Esha was born just seven months before Gauri Lankesh Patrike debuted, and she was the only thing that could pull Gauri away from her newspaper and her activism. When she was little, Esha wrote, Gauri would tell her bedtime stories of Cinderella—but Gauri’s Cinderella was always a career woman who would never pine for a prince and who had adventures on her own terms. When Esha was older, Gauri would take her to hear speeches by student activists or make her watch them on YouTube. But she didn’t want children of her own. In a 2015 interview, Pratibha Nandakumar made Gauri laugh by asking her how her life would be different if she were married. “They’d have left me by now!” Gauri said, listing her weekly, her publishing work, her activism, and her court cases. “This leaves no room for me to miss anything. I am not one of those ‘traditional Indian women.’ ” At some point she had an abortion; I’d heard from one friend that she’d been pushed into it and regretted it, but Kavitha told me this wasn’t so.

“I knew what she did, I knew what she loved and I knew especially what she hated, but I did not know how many lives she had influenced,” Esha wrote. She was astonished to see how many thousands showed up to view her body. “I wish I had spent more time with her,” she wrote. “I wish I had told her more often how truly I loved her. I wish I had told her how proud I was of her and the work she did.”

A few days later finally got to meet with M. N. Anucheth, the lead investigator of the SIT. Now that his investigation was nearly complete—“95 percent done,” he said—he was able to talk and generous with his time. We met at the Bangalore police’s Criminal Investigation Department complex, which is where the SIT is headquartered, and as we passed through its generic white cubicles, he told me that now there were 15 members of the SIT, but at its peak there were no fewer than 226 police officers working on the investigation into Gauri’s murder, and 40 or 50 people whose contribution was significant. “It is not just a one-person show,” he said. “It was not Mr. B. K. Singh or it was not Anucheth who cracked the case. It was this SIT. So we always refer to ourselves as the team, never individually. That was a decision we took from the beginning: we swim together or sink together.” (Later in our conversation, though, he did single out Singh for praise: “I think he’s a genius! Very soft-spoken. His mind is always working. Even when he’s sleeping, I think he’s always thinking about this case.”)

Handsome, fit, and very serious, Anucheth walks fast and talks fast, although sometimes he’d freeze while searching for a word, apparently out of total exhaustion. (A few months earlier, citing his success in the Gauri investigation, the Supreme Court handed him an additional assignment as the new lead investigator for the Kalburgi assassination, on top of his primary duty as a deputy commissioner of police.) He wore a khaki uniform, a navy- blue beret, and a tidy black mustache, and laughed only when I asked him an unexpected question, but otherwise never smiled, and often winced.

From the police perspective, “it was a blind murder case,” he said. “The motive itself was not clear. We were groping in the dark. That was the biggest challenge. So we probed along the Naxal line, personal enmity, something to do with her official dealings, something to do with her writings, her personal life. A lot of people had filed defamation cases against her. There was a rumor that some Naxalites were unhappy with her, but we were able to talk with them and we sent feelers out, and that angle was ruled out. We probed even Indrajit Lankesh, because there was a fight with Gauri, and there was some bad blood, but it had been sorted out. We were not able to get clear direction. But we started eliminating the chaff from the grain.” He quoted a famous Sherlock Holmes line: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” (In my experience, Indian Police Service officers love to quote Sherlock Holmes.) “We started closing in. There were only a few angles remaining. Finally we narrowed it down to this right-wing thing.” The clincher for focusing on the right-wing angle, he said, came around two months into the investigation, when ballistic testing definitively proved that the same gun had been used to kill three of the victims in the pattern: Gauri, Kalburgi, and Pansare. Pansare had been shot with two guns, and the SIT was furthermore confident that the second gun used to shoot Pansare was also used on Dabholkar, the first victim in the pattern—meaning that only two guns were used for all four murders. One of the suspects told the SIT that he’d thrown the guns into Vasai Creek, near Mumbai. The Central Bureau of Investigation was now attempting to search the creek for the weapons. It sounded like an enormous headache, not least because the search was constrained by environmental regulations since the creek is a protected mangrove area.

Before filing their 9,235-page charge sheet, the SIT had invoked Karnataka’s organized-crime law—a move that suggested that Gauri’s murder had been committed on behalf of a larger organization or syndicate. The invocation of the organized-crime law also had the benefit of extending the deadline to submit the document by another ninety days. The reason the charge sheet needed to be so unusually long, Anucheth explained, is that there were no direct eyewitnesses to the murder—and under Indian law “ocular evidence” is paramount. That, he said, was their second-biggest challenge. So they had to collect an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence to compensate for the shortcoming.

Among the sixteen men so far arrested, he said, “some have been very reluctant to cooperate with the investigation. Some have cooperated with the investigation. I would say that the person who shot her did cooperate with the investigation.” He said that they had custody of Parashuram Waghmare, the suspected shooter, for fifteen days, and he cried the entire time. In contrast, Amol Kale, the man they suspect of being the group’s ringleader, “just doesn’t care. He’s remorseless, just so coldhearted.” But when Kale realized how much they’d already figured out, “he was shocked. We were able to tell him that whether you cooperate or not, we’re going to find out. The shock on his face—that was good.

“This gang had done everything possible to conceal themselves,” he said. “It was very carefully and meticulously planned. They conspired, they planned, they rehearsed, they practiced, they executed. All five stages were done very professionally. The amount of evidence we get is very less. So we had to use some scientific techniques.”

Their first breakthrough after the ballistic match was aided by machine- learning analysis of phone data. First they compiled a list of phone numbers associated with thousands of different extremists, both on the left and on the right, and focused on calls placed in the two or three months leading up to Gauri’s murder. Based on the patterns they detected, they put a small number of people on the list under surveillance and intercepted their phone calls. “One of them happened to be K. T. Naveen Kumar,” he said. “He was not known to us before this. We were not initially sure of it.” But then, in late October 2017, they listened in on a phone call in which Naveen Kumar told a friend that he’d been in hiding because of Gauri’s murder. “At random, why would a person talk about Gauri’s case?” he asked. “And why would he be absconding? We continued our surveillance. Then we realized they were planning the murder of Professor Bhagawan.”

They also collected all of the Bangalore traffic police’s CCTV footage from a five-kilometer radius around Gauri’s house and used artificial intelligence to pick out all motorcycles carrying two helmet-wearing people. This process helped them determine exactly one thing: the make and model of the motorcycle. Based on its local prevalence, this reduced the number of possible motorcycles from around five million to around thirty thousand.

They used AI, too, to help generate images of some of the suspects still at large. The accused deliberately knew very little about each other, precisely to make it difficult for the police if any of them got caught. “So we’ll get probably a fake number, fake name, fake accent,” he said. “The only thing we’ll get real about him is his physical description.” These images helped them make their second arrest, Sujith Kumar, whom they knew little about aside from what Naveen Kumar told them.

Local tech companies aided the SIT with these AI and machine-learning techniques, he said. “They don’t want to be named. But there are two companies which helped us.” I said that he must have had a lot of help to choose from, given that Bangalore tech firms are where lots of AI innovation is happening. “It’s…happening, but not many people want to cooperate once they realize it’s a criminal investigation,” he said. “They don’t want to get involved. It was difficult to find a company which does it and is willing. We did find. They did help us out. And we are very grateful for that.”

In the CCTV footage recovered from Gauri’s house, the shooter appears for only six seconds, and his face is obscured by his motorcycle helmet. And because it was night, the camera was shooting on infrared mode, which further muddied the image. “We had to prove very rudimentary things, like, is this the same guy, was he at the spot?” Anucheth said. “So we did something called gait analysis.” In June 2018, after the SIT captured Parashuram Waghmare, they brought him to Gauri’s house and had him reenact the shooting to see if he moved in the same manner as the figure in the footage. “We reconstructed the entire sequence of events and recorded it using the same CCTV camera, and then it was matched frame by frame.”

Another suspect took the police to a wooded area where Waghmare and the other conspirators had practiced shooting. The SIT came equipped with an EDAX machine (for energy dispersive X-ray analysis). “We looked for holes in the trees, and we’d use this machine to see if there’s any copper or iron in it. That means a bullet has passed through, and we’d just cut it down and find it.” One of those bullets was a ballistic match for the ones that struck Gauri.

Given how little many of the suspects knew about each other, the interrogations were a challenge. “They kept the information compartmentalized,” Anucheth said. “It was on a need-to-know basis. There was only so much he could tell you. So it is like doing a big jigsaw puzzle where you have only few pieces of the puzzle.” Sometimes it was literally a puzzle—the police had to decode hundreds of phone numbers written in a cipher and dozens of aliases and code names that they found in the diaries they recovered from five of the suspects. Mostly, though, the contents of the diaries were genuinely diaristic. “Generally their feelings, their perceptions in life, daily thoughts,” he said. “There is a rule in Sanatan Sanstha that you have to write your own faults. A lot of the diaries had this kind of faultfinding. So one guy writes that he had a dream about a girl and he had those nasty thoughts. They write down their faults, and they discuss it, and he tries to overcome it. That’s one of the techniques in their cult. It did give us an insight into their psychology.” The killers, it turns out, were writers, too. Unfortunately for me, their diaries are not included in the charge sheet.

Finally, there was genetic evidence. At one of the group’s hideouts, the SIT found a few strands of hair. DNA testing matched them to Amol Kale, the suspected ringleader. DNA was also essential when the SIT recovered four toothbrushes. One of the suspects had been tasked with destroying all the killers’ clothing and other personal effects. He was supposed to have burned everything, but the things he couldn’t destroy by burning he threw on the roadside on the outskirts of Bangalore; every hundred yards or so he’d throw more evidence out of his car window. When the SIT captured him, he showed them the spots where he’d tossed the items. They found a bag with four toothbrushes in it, and one of the toothbrushes was a DNA match for Waghmare, the shooter.

Anucheth seemed entirely unbothered by the constant criticism the SIT received when it appeared to the public that they had made no progress in the first half year after Gauri’s murder. “Naturally, we were derided, teased,criticized, mocked,” he said. “There was a lot of sarcasm spewed on us. But that never affected us, because when you’re doing a professional job, you can’t put a time limit on it.”

I asked him about the suspects’ allegations that they’d been tortured in custody. He groaned audibly. “Yeah, see, this is a standard tactic adopted by this set of advocates for this organization wherein they make allegations against everyone,” he said. “Right from the beginning they started making allegations against the police, citing custodial torture, assault, ill treatment.” He categorically denied that the SIT had tortured or otherwise mistreated the suspects.

I noted that the charge sheet includes the entirety of the Sanatan Sanstha book Kshatradharma Sadhana and asked him if the SIT had concluded that the killers were taking orders from the group. “There’s a link which is missing,” he said. He said that they know that the group was inspired by the writings of Sanatan Sanstha, and at least four of the accused had been members of the group, but the SIT found that they quit the Sanatan Sanstha “specifically to go underground” and start their nameless assassination syndicate. “Specifically whether the orders came from Sanatan Sanstha, we have not been able to prove conclusively.” He said that they came quite close; in the course of their investigation, they found that the top editor of Sanatan Sanstha’s daily newspaper—Shashikant Rane, alias Kaka—was very close to the assassins. But Rane died of a heart attack in April 2018, before the SIT knew of his involvement and before they’d arrested anyone but Naveen Kumar. He seemed to think that the moment to directly implicate Sanatan Sanstha had passed. Two of the suspects named in the charge sheet were still at large, but he did not expect any additional people to be charge sheeted.

I asked him about the reports that a local TV news channel had ruined the SIT’s plan to arrest one suspect at a wedding. Anucheth laughed with surprise, then looked miserable. “Yeah, it happened,” he said. “It’s all water under the bridge.” In the end they did capture the suspect, albeit several months later. “The setback was that someone on our team had leaked operational information,” he said. “I was more worried about that, because it would put the operation in jeopardy and my team on the ground in physical danger.” The officer responsible was removed from the SIT. After that, the SIT members shared their findings with each other only on a need-to-know basis. It occurred to me that this precaution paralleled the way the killers compartmentalized information.

I asked him if he had any concerns that any member of the SIT might be politically sympathetic to right-wing extremism. This struck me as highly probable, given that hundreds of policemen were assigned to the SIT at its peak. “Well, I think we were lucky to have a very professional investigation team which put aside its personal ideology or personal beliefs and just concentrated on doing the job at hand,” he said. “I don’t for a single instant believe any of our people were compromised or put their personal beliefs or ideologies ahead of their own professional work. I think we were lucky. This team was handpicked. So that helped. I myself, I’m a practicing Hindu. And that doesn’t mean that I have to compromise on my work. I mean, see, I don’t care who’s sitting next to me in a train, man. Or when I go to a hotel, I don’t ask, has it been used by somebody? I will not use that plate. When I’m traveling in a flight, I don’t mind chatting up the next person. I don’t ask him what is his religion or what is his caste. Majority of us are like that.”

I asked him if, in the Indian police in general, there are political sympathies in one direction or another that interfere with police work. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve been in the service for ten years. Never have I found any political party or anybody telling us to work in one particular way or favor one particular—never. See, end of the day, any person sitting in a responsible position understands the gravity of the situation. You cannot have a situation where people are killed for their voice or their beliefs. I think freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental right, and I think we should do everything in our power to uphold it. And everybody does so. There are some fundamental things which everybody believes in like the right to life, the right to speech. Everybody should uphold it, and they do uphold it. I’m talking about people in power. Otherwise it’s not possible to have a democracy. Democracy is on some fundamental principles. I think there’s a lot of focus in one section of the media to highlight intolerance, or so-called atrocities against the minorities. But I don’t think it is true. I think it is a perception created by certain sections of the media. No government supports any of these activities. When they come to the responsible post, everybody behaves responsibly.”

It was one of the naivest things I’ve ever heard anyone say, and it was impossible that such an intelligent and perceptive man could be that naive. We were inundated with evidence of irresponsibility and intolerance among those in authority. It’s well documented that Hindu nationalists work systematically to increase their numbers in India’s police forces, and that Hindutva militias have often worked closely with police during riots and pogroms. But Anucheth said it with total conviction, and he made a point of saying it. Maybe the only way to function in India as an honest cop, as Anucheth seemed to be, was to lie to yourself.

(The first excerpt was published some days ago and may be read here. The second excerpt may be read here.

Parts four will soon be published which is the concluding excerpt of the book.)

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.

Related:

Rationalist Murders: Slamming CBI’s shoddy probe & failure to nab masterminds, Pune court slams attempt to “finish off Dabholkar’s ideology”

10 years since Narendra Dabholkar’s murder, protest in Mumbai, SC asks CBI to look into ‘larger conspiracy’

Firing at the Heart of Truth: Remembering MM Kalburgi

Teesta Setalvad On Assault On Reason

Death of a Rationalist: Govind Pansare

Contrasting two lists: one with “facts” on right-wing deaths, the second, targeting other writers after Gauri Lankesh

Storms battered her from outside, but she stood, an unwavering flame: Gauri Lankesh

Honour for killers of Gauri Lankesh and MM Kalburgi in Karnataka, public felicitation and terms like “Hindu tigers” for accused Amit Baddi and Ganesh…

Protest in Karnataka as activists condemns felicitation of Gauri Lankesh murder accused by right-wing groups

Murderers or Martyrs? The dangerous glorification of murdered Gauri Lankesh’s accused by Hindutva groups

Gauri Lankesh assassination: 6 years down, no closure for family and friends, justice elusive

The post Delving into the hearts and minds of ‘killers’ who took the life of journalist-activist, Gauri Lankesh appeared first on SabrangIndia.

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.

Related:

Storms battered her from outside, but she stood, an unwavering flame: Gauri Lankesh

Honour for killers of Gauri Lankesh and MM Kalburgi in Karnataka, public felicitation and terms like “Hindu tigers” for accused Amit Baddi and Ganesh…

Protest in Karnataka as activists condemns felicitation of Gauri Lankesh murder accused by right-wing groups

Murderers or Martyrs? The dangerous glorification of murdered Gauri Lankesh’s accused by Hindutva groups

Gauri Lankesh assassination: 6 years down, no closure for family and friends, justice elusive

The post Contrasting two lists: one with “facts” on right-wing deaths, the second, targeting other writers after Gauri Lankesh appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
Yoga and Ahimsa aren’t the only elements of the world’s so-called largest democracy. It’s time for those enamoured by India’s tolerance and diversity to open their eyes and get familiar with the growing religious bigotry under a right-wing Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government.
 
Illiberal India: Gauri Lankesh and the Age of Unreason by Chidanand Rajghatta can help in understanding this ugly reality. Based on the life and murder of a Kannada journalist Gauri Lankesh on September 5, 2017, by Hindu extremists, the book is authored by none other than the deceased’s ex-husband.
 
Rajghatta, who himself is a journalist reveals that though the couple had divorced they remained good friends. So much so, his current wife Mary Breeding and their children also adored her. That Mary chose to write an obituary for Gauri that is included in the postscript of the book shows how open and generous she was.
 
It was this liberalism both in her personal and journalistic life that led to her assassination.
 
Gauri was the Editor of Gauri Lankesh Patrike that gave voice to the minorities and the oppressed communities. She remained a vocal critic of the Hindu Right that has gained currency ever since the BJP came to power in India with a brute majority in 2014. The attacks on Muslims and other minority communities by those who wish to turn India into Hindu theocracy have intensified.
 
Gauri who was also an activist was agitated by the rapid growth of Hindu fanaticism in her home state of Karnataka that has always been known for its pluralism. She was influenced by her late father who was a progressive journalist and writer and denounced superstition and sectarianism. Though she had begun her journalistic career in the mainstream English press, she gave it up to join her father’s publication Lankesh Patrike that mastered in Kannada journalism. Only after she fell apart with her brother for ideological reasons, she started a publication under her name.    
 
Gauri who had no inclination towards religion and had scientific temperament ensured that no rituals were observed at the funeral of her father.
 
She was a defender of the Indian constitution that is based on the principles of secularism and democracy and guarantees religious freedom. She remained a staunch opponent of the caste system that stratifies Indian society and supports untouchability and therefore openly challenged Hindu orthodoxy for practising it. Though she was equally critical of the opposition Congress party for pandering religious groups and fanaticism of every shade, she had come under constant attack from the supporters of BJP and Hindu right-wing groups during the months preceding her death. Some active on social media had rejoiced her murder. 
 
In private gatherings too, nothing stopped her from challenging those, including family friends who blinded by majoritarianism said nasty things about Muslims or the depressed classes. Rajghatta mentions how she once recommended him to hire a single mother as domestic help and take care of her daughters.  
 
The author offers so many details that a reader can take away not only the memories of Gauri as a hero of the underdog but a deeper understanding of how India is heading to become a monolithic and closed society. 
 
The book isn’t just the story of Gauri, it rather situates her story in the broader context of the current situation of India where freethinkers and rationalists are being targeted for questioning the power and challenging the myths with impunity.
 

The post This book on Gauri Lankesh shows the illiberal side of India appeared first on SabrangIndia.