This excerpt, the fourth and the last d in a series of four that Sabrangindia is publishing, looks at the methodology employed by the conspirators and killers of four rationalists, including Gauri Lankesh. The editors remain thankful to the author and to Westland Books for permission to publish this excerpt.

CHAPTER 20

The Nameless Group

In 1986, the Kannada novelist, U. R. Ananthamurthy wrote a nuanced essay about religion and superstition titled “Why Not Worship in the Nude?” (Its title is a reference to a controversial Hindu sect whose adherents pray unclothed.) The essay teems with complexities and questions, including the following: “Haven’t I become what I am by de-mythifying, even desecrating, the world of my childhood? As a boy growing up in my village, didn’t I urinate stealthily and secretly on sacred stones under trees to prove to myself that they have no power over me?”

The essay was little known until June 2014, when M. M. Kalburgi referred to the quoted passage in a speech. This time it landed in a political climate that hungers to be offended, and this passage of Kalburgi’s speech attracted wide media attention. But the media (including Sanatan Sanstha’s daily newspaper) immediately got two things very wrong: first, it was reported as Kalburgi describing his own childhood experience, not referring to Ananthamurthy; second, it was reported that he’d urinated not on sacred stones but on Hindu idols, a far more grievous act of desecration. Some even claimed that Kalburgi had urged his audience to urinate on idols. A brief, contextless video clip of this bit of Kalburgi’s speech played repeatedly even on mainstream TV news channels and circulated widely online.

It was this episode—this garbled reporting of a literary reference that Kalburgi made once—that motivated his assassins to murder him, the SIT found. The killers didn’t care about, and never read, the hundred books he wrote. They were indifferent to his stance on the Lingayat issue. His entire life’s work and thought were reduced for them to this one misunderstood moment, then whipped up into an offense so intolerable that they could not permit him to live.

Dabholkar and Pansare seem to have been murdered for more obvious reasons: their insistent campaigns against superstition, which right-wing Hindu groups saw as a direct threat to their religion and culture. But why did they murder Gauri?

In India it is common for police complaints to be filed against people for “hurting religious sentiments,” a phrase that is perhaps unique to India and that is frequently invoked in the news media. The relevant law, Section 295A, is obviously well meaning: religion is a volatile subject in India, so a disincentive to needless religious provocation seems wise. In practice, though, Section 295A seems to have encouraged a very vocal minority from all religions to develop a hair-trigger sensitivity to any potential insult (including satire, legitimate criticism, unintended implications, and innocent misstatements), and even to seek out opportunities to be offended, because the law seems to enshrine an actual right not to be offended, at least when it comes to religion.

In its charge sheet, the SIT concluded that the assassins’ motivation for killing Gauri was very specific: a single speech she gave, in Kannada, at a Communal Harmony Forum event in Mangalore, on August 2, 2012. “What is this Hindu religion?” she said in the speech. “Who is the founder of this religion? We know the founder of the Christian religion and its holy book, we know the Muslim religion and also its holy book, likewise about the Sikh religion, the Buddhist religion, Jain religion, but who is the founder of the Hindu religion?…This is a religion without a father and mother and it does not have a holy book. It never existed, and it was named only after the British, can it be called a religion?”

A video clip of this speech circulated widely on YouTube and WhatsApp with the caption “Why I hate secularism in India.” And the SIT found that as each new member of the assassination team was inducted into the conspiracy, the ringleaders would show them this particular clip, often repeatedly, as the primary motivator of their will to kill. They told their recruits that in making these remarks, Gauri had “caused great damage” to Hinduism, and that further harm will befall Hinduism “if she is permitted to continue to speak this way.”

In December 2016, Gauri herself posted a link to the video, writing, “I am facing a case because of this speech. I stand by every word I said.” Police had booked her for what she said in the speech, not under Section 295A, but under Section 153, incitement to riot (although there had been no riot). A court hearing in the case was scheduled for September 15, 2017, ten days after her death. Her friend Vivek Shanbhag told me he saw this clip circulate much more widely on social media after her murder—“certainly to convey that this is justified.” These re-postings were often captioned with lines like of course killing is wrong, but look at what she said.

It wasn’t important to the killers even how influential their targets were. They themselves had mostly never even heard of Gauri until they were shown this video. The important thing was whether the target had done or said something—even a single quotation, and ideally captured on video—that could crystallize outrage against the target. It turned out that it wasn’t about suppressing unfavorable journalism, and it wasn’t about the Lingayat debate. (The killers didn’t care about vote-bank politics.) It was because the killers simply believed they had a duty to kill those who had, in their view, intolerably insulted Hinduism, regardless of their stature and influence. As the Sanatan Sanstha book Kshatradharma Sadhana put it, the seekers had to slay the evildoers.

Beyond that imperative, it seemed to me that the killers weren’t strategic at all in their choice of target, although Gauri’s friend Shivasundar disagreed with me. “I think they have multiple strategies,” he said. “One of the strategies is to kill the local problematic people. They may not be high profile, but they are an immediate impediment. Writing in local languages, immediately they’re a threat. They did not think that Gauri would have so much national and international attention, because they didn’t do much homework on Gauri, I don’t think. So this actually blew up beyond their imagination. It boomeranged. But other people in the target are local, state- level kind of leaders. I think that is the new strategy, assassinating these kinds of people.”

There is no concept of blasphemy in Hindu scripture. It’s an idea that comes from the Abrahamic tradition. Christianity and Judaism seem to have retreated from it, by and large. But Hindutva has adopted it; in recent years Sanatan Sanstha has been agitating for an Indian anti-blasphemy law. Hindutva hard-liners, in defense of their touchiness, often point out how touchy many Muslims are over any negative comments on Islam or Muhammad, which is of course true. But it’s a strange thing to aspire to the touchiness of the most insecure Muslims. A great deal of Hindutva seems to be geared toward imitating the most reactionary qualities of the religion (Islam) and the country (Pakistan) that they claim to hate the most.

It’s important to note that the current level of Hindutva sensitivity is a recent development. Gandhi was assassinated not because of particular things he said but because the Hindu right wing thought that he’d used his enormous influence over the future of South Asia to “appease” its Muslim population en masse and thereby, supposedly, give away half the country (in the form of Pakistan). The author of the Indian Constitution, B. R. Ambedkar, converted to Buddhism in 1956 along with hundreds of thousands of his fellow Dalits. “I am ecstatic! I have left hell—this is how I feel,” he said the next day. “Because of the Hindu religion, no one can progress. That religion is only a destructive religion.” Those words haven’t stopped the BJP and RSS from attempting to co-opt his legacy in the hopes of attracting a Dalit following. K. S. Bhagawan, the next person the assassins planned to kill, pointed out to me that he’d been saying inflammatory things about Hinduism for decades; only recently did anyone threaten to murder him over it.

Still, several of Gauri’s friends and colleagues told me that while obviously she deserved no harm for anything she said, they didn’t honestly like that she could be so pejorative about Hinduism instead of reserving her criticism for Hindutva. “I really think that the way Gauri, or some of us, or many such people addressed these issues was not correct,” said H. V. Vasu— a progressive activist whose secular credentials are impeccable. “You may be an atheist, but there are people who are religious. And especially when irrationality is growing, and more and more people are going to the other side—even common people who are actually voting for an ideology that oppresses them. Then what approach should you take? You should stick to your ground in fighting for democratic rights, secularism, all that is true. But people do need God. Even when Marx said that religion is opium, there were other sentences attached to it—he said that religion is the heart of the heartless world and the soul of the soulless world. There’s so much suffering and insecurity in this world. You must acknowledge that people have spiritual needs.”

On New Year’s Day 2012, in the northern Karnataka town of Sindagi, six young men were arrested for hoisting the national flag of Pakistan on the flagpole in front of a local government office. The men were members of the fringe Hindutva group Sri Ram Sena; their intention was to whip up tensions with the local Muslim population. The man who actually hoisted the Pakistan flag was a twenty-year-old college student named Parashuram Waghmare. Five years later, he would shoot and kill Gauri Lankesh. The ringleaders of the group who conspired to kill her recruited him precisely because of the initiative he’d shown in the flag-hoisting incident.

Waghmare had never heard of Gauri until those conspirators told him they wanted him to kill her and showed him the video of her speech. But Gauri, oddly enough, had heard of Waghmare. His flag-hoisting escapade was notorious in Karnataka. In the January 28, 2012, issue of Gauri Lankesh Patrike, she even wrote about it for her lead editorial. “It has been proven now that patriotism, nationalism, and religiousness are simply a few table topics” to Hindutva activists, she wrote. “Their true agenda has been to instigate communal hate between different religions of India through acts of terrorism.” She called Waghmare and his accomplices “Hindu hooligans.” Her next issue’s cover story was an investigation into the flag-hoisting incident by one of her reporters.

But another group was already rising, one that Gauri knew nothing about yet. I derived all of the information in the following account of that group from the 255 pages of statements of the accused included in the SIT’s charge sheet, as well as newspaper articles by Johnson T. A. of The Indian Express and K. V. Aditya Bharadwaj of The Hindu, who are universally considered the two most accurate and reliable reporters on the assassination of Gauri Lankesh. At the time I’m writing this, the trial against these suspects is ongoing, and every sentence that follows should be presumed to include the word “allegedly.”

The founder of the assassination organisation that murdered Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M. M. Kalburgi, and Gauri Lankesh was Dr. Virendra Tawade, an ENT surgeon who had been a longtime member of Sanatan Sanstha. Tawade had led Sanatan Sanstha’s protest campaign against Dabholkar’s anti-superstition organization, MANS—one medical doctor versus another. Tawade founded the assassination group at the urging of Shashikant Rane, alias Kaka, the top editor of Sanatan Sanstha’s newspaper, Sanatan Prabhat. In 2010 or 2011, Rane convened a meeting at the Sanatan Sanstha ashram in Goa with Tawade and two other Sanatan Sanstha members: Amol Kale and Amit Degwekar. Amol Kale was a leader of the Sanatan Sanstha’s offshoot Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and served as a salesman of the organization’s publications. Amit Degwekar lived at the Goa ashram and worked as a promoter and proofreader of Sanatan Prabhat. His roommate at the ashram had died in 2009 when he accidentally detonated his explosives while attempting to bomb the festival in the nearby town of Margao.

Dr. Tawade was founding the new group, Rane told Kale and Degwekar at the meeting, because “Hindu dharma is in trouble.” The law would clearly not protect their interests, so they needed to take the law into their own hands. Hindu youth must be gathered, a sense of revolution must be instilled in them, and they must carry out the religious work of destroying evildoers. Dr. Tawade was not giving the organization a name, Rane explained, because a name would only make it easier for the police to identify and thwart them. Rane would remain in his role at Sanatan Sanstha and help fund the new nameless group (until he died in 2018, inconveniently for the SIT). The other three men at the founding meeting—along with two other early members of the group, Sujith Kumar and Vikas Patil—would henceforth disassociate themselves from Sanatan Sanstha. Degwekar would serve as liaison between Sanatan Sanstha and the new, nameless group, as well as its treasurer.

Over the next few years, as they enlisted dozens of recruits, the Nameless Group developed a strict set of protocols. To aid focus and avoid mistakes, chant mantras every day. When mistakes occur, write them down. When meeting other members of the Nameless Group, don’t request or share anything personal, including line of work, and especially don’t ask or offer names or personal phone numbers; only call other members using specially assigned burner phones. Everyone would be assigned a code name, numbers would be written in a cipher, and all references to criminal activities would be conducted in code words.

It’s important to note that the co-conspirators barely knew one another. They often didn’t have fluent languages in common because they came from several different states. They met at bus stands, wearing caps to recognize one another, and at training camps in remote areas, where they received practical education in weapons (guns, petrol bombs, IEDs) and subterfuge (how to mislead the police; how to endure police torture). It’s only after they were arrested that most of them spent much time with one another.

One member was a used-car salesman. One was a goldsmith. One ran a fragrance shop; another ran a computer-assisted design company. One was a civil contractor and former elementary school teacher. One worked as an astrologer and Ayurveda specialist. One sold incense sticks; another was a vegetable vendor. The day job of another, incredibly, was personal assistant to a Congress Party legislator. One was a motorcycle mechanic, who, more to the point, was also a skilled motorcycle thief. The mechanic said that when Dr. Tawade met the new recruits, “he filled our heads with all his thoughts. He kept emphasizing the point that if we did anything for dharma, our family would be safe in all the seven lives to come.”

Sharad Kalaskar, who was selected to shoot Narendra Dabholkar, worked as a farmer. After Kalaskar committed the deed, on August 20, 2013, Dr. Tawade told him that he would be uplifted in all seven births, that he would go to God as Arjuna (one of the warrior heroes of the Mahabharata), and that even though he had committed a big “event”—their code word for “attack”—the police would not catch him because God’s grace was upon him.

Around that time, several members held a meeting to brainstorm whom they might kill next. One new recruit—Mohan Nayak, who served as a leader of the Karnataka branch of the Sanatan Sanstha offshoot HJS—made a list that included a supposed Naxalite, a Muslim politician, and Agni Sreedhar. A more senior member explained to him that he should not include Muslims, Christians, or politicians on the list; their priority, he explained, should be Hindus by birth who had become traitors to Hinduism and who were therefore threats to their own faith. Such people were bigger threats to the faith than Muslims. Nayak got the idea and suggested a different name: Gauri Lankesh.

But that would wait. On February 16, 2015, the Nameless Group killed Govind Pansare. On August 30, 2015, they killed M. M. Kalburgi; for this killing, the shooter was Ganesh Miskin, alias Mithun, who would go on to drive the motorcycle for the Gauri Lankesh assassination.

On June 10, 2016, the Central Bureau of Investigation arrested Dr. Tawade for Dabholkar’s murder—three years after Dabholkar’s murder and two years after the CBI had taken over the investigation from the Maharashtra police. After the arrest, Rane, the editor of Sanatan Sanstha’s newspaper, summoned Tawade’s deputy, Amol Kale, to the Goa ashram and made him the new head of the Nameless Group. “You take up the lead of the dharma work and continue,” he said. “We’ll provide you with all the assistance from time to time.”

In June 2016, the group’s main recruiter, who goes by the alias Praveen, showed the other senior members the video clip from the speech Gauri had delivered in Mangalore in 2012, in which she ridiculed Hinduism for not having a “mother or father.” In the last week of August they called a meeting with several junior members of the group, at which they discussed the Sanatan Sanstha book Kshatradharma Sadhana and each drew up lists of evildoers. They soon coalesced around Gauri as their next target. Kale’s diary revealed the group’s code name for their plot to kill Gauri: Operation Amma (“amma” meaning “mother”).

Kale introduced a different operational style to the Nameless Group. Whereas Tawade’s plots were straightforward—case the victim’s house, then show up and shoot him at an opportune time—Kale’s plot against Gauri was much more elaborate and compartmentalised, with separate teams running each facet of the operation. They were more careful than ever, but also more confident.

In October 2016, the Nameless Group enlisted Parashuram Waghmare. They had been particularly impressed by Waghmare’s arrest for hoisting the Pakistan flag. They told him there was someone who needed to be murdered and urged him to meditate and pray. That same month, the group’s mechanic stole the Hero Honda Passion Pro motorcycle that the hit team would use for Gauri’s murder and gave it to Amol Kale.

Meanwhile, Kale gave Gauri’s office address to two of the younger recruits—Ganesh Miskin and Amit Baddi—and assigned them to do reconnaissance. In late March they traveled to Bangalore, stayed at the house of a friend (lying to him that they were in town for work), borrowed the friend’s motorcycle, and tailed Gauri for a couple days. In April they met Kale again, gave him her home address, and reported that she lived alone. The best time to kill her, they said, would be when she gets out of her car to open her house’s gate. Throughout the summer of 2017, these three men were crawling all over her neighborhood for weeks, continuing to study her movements, surveying all lights and CCTV cameras near her house, practicing multiple variations on routes, absorbed invisibly into the traffic of Bangalore. In July they brought Waghmare on a reconnaissance visit to Bangalore, but blindfolded him so that he’d know as little as necessary.

Throughout that summer the group also did firearms practice at a remote farm shed owned by one member, using a polystyrene mannequin as their target. They mostly used air pistols because real bullets were in short supply. Between shooting and karate they did meditation and yoga.

In June 2017, they recruited the final member of the team: K. T. Naveen Kumar, the one who slipped up first and gave them all away. That month, at the annual Sanatan Sanstha convention in Goa, he gave the impromptu speech, about the need to use weapons to protect Hindu dharma, that had so impressed his fellow convention goers. The HJS spokesperson Mohan Gowda then introduced him to Praveen, the Nameless Group’s recruiter. When they first met, Naveen Kumar gave Praveen two bullets, but came up empty when the group asked him again and again for more. Naveen Kumar talked big, but those two bullets were his only apparent contribution to the plot.

In the second week of August 2017, members of the Nameless Group stayed in the Bangalore suburbs for several days. There Kale gave them their assignments. Waghmare was assigned to shooting. Miskin was to drive the motorcycle on “event” day and to be the backup shooter—and also to shoot anyone who tried to interfere with the assassination. Baddi was to wait in a van en route to Gauri’s house to help the hit team with their clothes and guns, to retrieve the guns and clothes from them immediately after the “event,” and then to bring the guns and the motorcycle to the city of Belgaum. Kalaskar, who shot Dabholkar, was to continue training Waghmare and Miskin in shooting and to collect the guns from Baddi in Belgaum. A member named Bharat Kurne, code-named Uncle because he was a family man, was assigned to cook for the hit team, to ensure they got out of town on a bus on the night of the “event,” to bribe police if necessary, and to help keep the hit team’s minds “stable” by leading them in meditation and prayer.

After shooting practice, Waghmare selected the gun that he was most comfortable with, which happened to be the same gun that shot Pansare and Kalburgi. Miskin told Waghmare that he shot Kalburgi in the forehead and Waghmare should shoot Gauri in the forehead, too. Baddi advised Waghmare to chant God’s name while shooting, as is recommended in the Sanatan Sanstha book Kshatradharma Sadhana.

On September 2, 2017, Kale and another member traveled to Bangalore along with the hit team’s clothes, two guns, and twenty-five bullets. For the week of the murder, the Nameless Group had set up two hideouts in the southern suburbs of Bangalore. The core hit team—Waghmare, Miskin, Baddi, and Kurne—stayed together. When Waghmare was brought to that hideout, on September 3, the others again blindfolded him so that he wouldn’t know where it was.

September 4, 2017, was the day they chose to kill Gauri. The hit team woke up early to pray for an hour or two. Kurne cooked them lunch. As the time for the “event” approached, he instructed the hit team to use the toilet, to eat little food, and to carry cash. At around 6:30, Miskin gave Waghmare a pistol and kept one for himself. On the way to Gauri’s house, they stopped to put on their second layer of clothes and cover their faces with handkerchiefs and put a fake license plate on their motorcycle and load their guns. They arrived at the park near Gauri’s house at around 7:45. They waited there until 8:00, and then Waghmare walked over to Gauri’s house and found that she was already at home.

On September 5, 2017, they tried again, following the same plan and arriving at the park near Gauri’s house at around 7:50. When Gauri’s car appeared, taking a right turn by the park, Miskin pointed her out to Waghmare. They followed her on the motorcycle. When she got out of her car to open her gate, Waghmare stepped down from the motorcycle, aimed his gun at her head, and fired, striking her twice in the abdomen. She screamed and ran. He fired two more bullets, one of which struck the wall of her house, the other hitting her below the right shoulder. Meanwhile, Miskin turned the motorcycle around. He and Waghmare fled, stopping to reverse their disguises on the way back to the hideout. The gun was out of Waghmare’s possession fifteen minutes after the murder; he passed it to Baddi, who passed it to Kale, who wrapped it up and put it in a red suitcase, which went into a storage space rented for that purpose. At the hideout, Kurne was waiting for the killers with their luggage to get them to the bus out of town.

Half of the accused conspirators were outside Bangalore on the day of the assassination and only learned of its success the next day. On September 7, at a construction site in Belgaum, Kale met the core assassination team— Waghmare, Miskin, Baddi, and Kurne. He fed them chocolates and gave Waghmare 10,000 rupees, or around $150. Waghmare soon spent it all, 4,000 rupees of it on hospital treatment for nasal problems.

By October 2017, the Nameless Group had turned to the next item on their list: the assassination of Professor Bhagawan. In the first week of November 2017, most of the conspirators met at Kurne’s farm for further training and discussion of plans. As usual, their training session alternated between weapons training and dharma talks, prayer, and meditation. Despite the successful assassination in September, Kale appears to have been increasingly frustrated with his co-conspirators. He reprimanded one for not being in Bangalore to help during the “event.” He was angry at two others because he assigned them to do reconnaissance for three days on a social activist in Pune, but they came back with nothing.

Meanwhile, Praveen, the group’s recruiter, had been calling K. T. Naveen Kumar about the plot to kill Bhagawan, again asking him if he could procure more guns and bullets. Naveen Kumar told him he’d do literally anything to protect dharma and bragged, implausibly, that he could get guns from the late bandit Veerappan’s gang with a week’s notice. It was these phone calls that the SIT intercepted, giving them their big break and beginning their series of arrests.

In December 2017, led by Kale, ten members of the Nameless Group met in Pune to organize a bomb attack on the Sunburn Festival, an electronic dance music event, because they considered it contrary to their idea of Hindu culture, but they abandoned the plan after two members accidentally got caught on CCTV cameras while doing advance reconnaissance. The following month, Kale organized an attack on movie theaters showing the historical epic Padmaavat, because it is, as Kalaskar put it in his statement, “a misrepresentation of the history of Hindu kings” and might encourage Muslim men to pursue Hindu women. “We intended to cause loss of property and create an atmosphere of fear,” he said. In this they were successful: the group exploded bombs at two movie theaters. No one was hurt, but panic broke out and screenings of the film were canceled.

Around this time, Naveen Kumar asked the senior members of the group to meet him in Davanagere because, he said, the “things” had arrived for killing Bhagawan. When they arrived, Naveen Kumar gave them the runaround for a while before admitting he still had no guns—there was apparently “no signal” from “his side” because “they did not trust us enough.” Kale was furious. After this, Naveen Kumar never again picked up their calls.

On February 19, 2018, Naveen Kumar was arrested. The senior members of the group had an urgent meeting in Madgaon. They decided to collect their weapons stashes and move them to a safer place, to shave any facial hair, to wear glasses and caps, and to hide out for a while in a different house. But Kale assured the other conspirators that the arrest of Naveen Kumar wouldn’t affect them; they should meditate and pray and prepare for more dharma work. While in hiding, Kalaskar accidentally shot himself in the hand while cleaning a gun.

On May 20, 2018, Praveen, the group’s recruiter, was arrested; police found twenty-two phones, and many more loose SIM cards, in his kitchen, along with his diary and a copy of the book Kshatradharma Sadhana. The next day, police arrested three others, including Kale, while they waited for Praveen at a bus stand; they didn’t yet know of his arrest. In Kale’s possession police found twenty-one phones, plus three diaries at his home. In the possession of Degwekar, the group’s treasurer, they found several envelopes of cash, totaling over 150,000 rupees, that had been withdrawn from a Sanatan Sanstha bank account, along with the passbook for that account. Degwekar claimed that the money was subscription payments from readers of Sanatan Sanstha periodicals. Police found that the various diaries referred to over two dozen collaborators with the Nameless Group in Karnataka and dozens more in Maharashtra—over sixty arms-trained and

radicalised recruits total (most of whom had not yet participated in any hit jobs). Intelligence agencies immediately put as many of them as they could under surveillance if they didn’t yet have the evidence to arrest them. These recruits mostly came from a tri-state area: southwestern Maharashtra, Goa, and northern Karnataka. The annual Sanatan Sanstha convention in Goa, it seemed, was their central recruitment hub, where they sought out young men with violent tendencies and a history of communal incitement.

After learning of Kale’s arrest, the members at large destroyed their burner phones. Mohan Nayak destroyed the bomb gelatin he was storing for future attacks. Kalaskar, the member who’d shot Dabholkar and who’d helped train Gauri’s killers, burned his phone and his three diaries, which included his notes on how to make guns and bombs. On June 11, Waghmare was arrested.

Kalaskar still had the guns. After Waghmare’s arrest, Kalaskar met with the Sanatan Sanstha lawyer Sanjeev Punalekar. To cover their tracks, they had an elaborate method of meeting: Punalekar’s assistant placed an ad in Sanatan Prabhat seeking a security guard, and Kalaskar answered the ad, whereupon the assistant took him to meet Punalekar at his office. Punalekar asked Kalaskar whether Gauri’s murder could be tied to Kale or Tawade, and he asked about the location of the guns. Two days later they met again, and Punalekar told him to destroy the guns used for killing Gauri along with their remaining stash of guns and bombs. “He also asked me how long it would take to make new guns,” Kalaskar said in his statement, “and he said he would pay the cost for making guns.” Punalekar asked Kalaskar extensively about the Dabholkar murder and “various cases,” and told him not to worry.

I will note here that the account of Kalaskar’s conversations with Punalekar in the above paragraph comes directly from a statement that Kalaskar dictated and signed before a magistrate, which means that it is admissible as evidence in court. Later, in 2019, the Central Bureau of Investigation would arrest Punalekar in connection with Dabholkar’s murder. The SIT investigating Gauri’s murder said they considered Punalekar a “person of interest” in that case for advising Kalaskar to destroy the guns, but they did not arrest him.

On July 18, 2018, Mohan Nayak was arrested. On July 23, Kalaskar disassembled the guns in his possession, including those used in Gauri’s murder, then, with the help of Punalekar’s assistant, threw the guns’ slides and barrels into Vasai Creek, near Mumbai, which empties into the Arabian Sea. He kept the remaining gun parts for making new guns, calculating, apparently accurately, that only the slides and barrels were ballistically identifiable. Over the next three weeks, the SIT arrested seven more members of the Nameless Group, including Kalaskar, Kurne, Miskin, and Baddi.

On August 19, 2018, the Maharashtra Anti-terrorism Squad raided the house of the assistant of the Sanatan Sanstha lawyer Punalekar and found an enormous cache of explosives, plus sixteen complete pistols and many partially made pistols and pistol parts. The ATS concluded that most of these pistols were made or obtained after the arrest of Naveen Kumar six months before, which suggests an alarmingly rapid rearmament of the Nameless Group, even while their members were being arrested. In the past the group had lain low for as long as two years between hits, to let things cool down. Kale apparently wanted to accelerate the group’s work, to assign multiple simultaneous assassination plots and bombings to several teams. The bust also implied that the group had grown large enough that it was possible that enough members remained free to regroup and kill again.

On August 20 and September 8, two more members were arrested. Now only two of the eighteen men charge sheeted for Gauri’s murder remained at large, both of them senior members of the Nameless Group. “Sanatan Sanstha has no connection with these killings. Due to propaganda by the Communist Party, the misunderstanding about us has been created,” said a Sanatan Sanstha spokesperson on September 6, 2018, the day after the first anniversary of Gauri’s death. “Violence was never, is never and will never find any place in the mission of Sanatan Sanstha, which believes in working in a constitutional manner.”

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

The third excerpt was published too and may be read here. This is the fourth and concluding excerpt that we will be pulishing.)

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 and 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 How the noose tightened: understanding modus operandi of killers who took the life of journalist-activist, Gauri Lankesh appeared first on SabrangIndia.

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.

Baddi and Miskin, who are currently facing trial for their involvement in these targeted assassinations, later paid visits to the Siddharoodha Matha and Moorusavira Matha, reinforcing their alignment with right-wing religious factions. In a further sign of institutional complicity, banners hailing them as “Hindu tigers” were put up in parts of Hubballi, including near the Tulaja Bhavani temple, before temple authorities belatedly removed them.

A video of the celebration and felicitation may be viewed here:

This grotesque celebration of accused murderers is not an isolated incident. It reflects a broader and deeply troubling pattern within Hindutva extremist circles—one in which individuals who have committed or are accused of committing heinous crimes, including murder, rape, and lynching, are glorified as warriors of their cause rather than held accountable for their actions.

From killers to heroes

The public honouring of Baddi and Miskin comes just months after a similarly shocking episode in October 2024, when two other key accused in the Gauri Lankesh murder—Parashuram Waghmore and Manohar Yadave—were greeted as heroes upon their release from prison. After being granted bail by a Bengaluru sessions court on October 9, 2024, the two men were received in their hometown of Vijayapura with garlands, celebratory chants, and processions organised by the far-right group Sri Rama Sene.

At the centre of this spectacle was Umesh Vandal, a Sri Rama Sene leader who presided over the event as Waghmore and Yadave were draped in saffron shawls and welcomed like returning soldiers. The accused killers, far from showing remorse, went on to publicly pay homage to a statue of Shivaji, a move designed to project themselves as Hindutva warriors fighting a righteous battle. Videos of the event circulated widely on social media, triggering outrage among civil society groups, but drawing no meaningful condemnation from the political establishment.

Adding to the alarming trend, another accused in the Gauri Lankesh murder case, Shrikant Pangarkar, was inducted into the Shiv Sena faction led by Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde on October 19, 2024. Pangarkar, a former Maharashtra corporator, had been arrested in 2018 for his role in the assassination conspiracy but was granted bail by the Karnataka High Court in September 2024. The Shiv Sena’s decision to welcome him into its ranks ahead of the Maharashtra assembly elections sparked public outrage, forcing CM Shinde to hurriedly declare the appointment “null and void”—a mere face-saving exercise rather than a principled stand against extremism.

The public felicitations of both the accused in the Bilkis Bano case and the Gauri Lankesh murder case reveal a disturbing pattern of glorifying individuals involved in heinous crimes, particularly those targeting women. In the Bilkis Bano case, the eleven convicts who were responsible for the gang rape and mass murder during the 2002 Gujarat riots were released early and celebrated by right-wing groups, sending a chilling message of impunity for sexual violence against women. Similarly, the accused in the brutal murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh, a prominent woman who fearlessly challenged the forces of Hindutva, were honoured in a manner that undermines the seriousness of the crime. Both cases highlight how violence against women—whether in the form of sexual assault or political assassination—has been co-opted by extremist factions to advance their divisive agendas, while the state’s failure to hold the perpetrators accountable sends a dangerous message about the erosion of justice and respect for women in India. The glorification of such criminals not only trivialises the suffering of the victims but also emboldens future acts of gender-based violence and political murder.

The Gauri Lankesh case: A murder that exposed a network of hate

The killing of journalist Gauri Lankesh in 2017 was not an isolated act of violence. It was part of a calculated campaign against dissenters, rationalists, and progressive voices who dared to challenge Hindutva supremacy. Lankesh, a fearless journalist, was gunned down outside her home in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017, a brutal assassination that sent shockwaves across India.

The Karnataka Police’s Special Investigation Team (SIT) eventually arrested 17 individuals, all linked to the extremist outfit Sanatan Sanstha, revealing a vast network of Hindutva militants operating across multiple states. The investigation found that Waghmore was the shooter, with Miskin as the getaway driver. Their case, like that of many others charged with politically motivated killings, has been dragged out in court, leading to bail for several accused on procedural grounds.

The SIT uncovered further links between the Gauri Lankesh murder and other high-profile assassinations of rationalists, including MM Kalburgi, Govind Pansare, and Narendra Dabholkar. These killings form part of an ideological crusade in which Hindutva extremists systematically target voices that oppose their radical vision of Hindu nationalism.

While legal proceedings remain ongoing, the celebration of the accused makes it clear that for their supporters, these men are not criminals—they are ideological foot soldiers in a war against secularism and rational thought.

A systemic pattern: Hindutva’s hero worship of convicted criminals

The glorification of murder accused in Karnataka is not an aberration—it is part of a well-documented pattern of Hindutva forces celebrating individuals involved in communal violence, sexual violence, and hate crimes.

• 2022: Bilkis Bano Case (Gujarat) – Eleven convicts in the gang-rape and mass murder case were released early and garlanded in Godhra by RSS member Arvind Sisodia, signalling approval of anti-Muslim violence.
• 2020: Bulandshahr Mob Violence (Uttar Pradesh) – Shikhar Agarwal, accused in the mob killing of police officer Subodh Kumar Singh, was honoured by BJP’s Bulandshahr president Anil Sisodia, reinforcing political protection for rioters.
• 2019: Bulandshahr Lynching Case (Uttar Pradesh) – Seven accused in Inspector Singh’s lynching received a hero’s welcome from Bajrang Dal, VHP, and right-wing groups, legitimising vigilantism.
• 2018: Gujarat Pogrom Planner Honoured (Gujarat) – Keka Shastry, a VHP leader who admitted to planning the 2002 Gujarat carnage, was felicitated and praised by BJP leaders, showcasing open endorsement of communal violence.
• 2018: Ajmer Dargah Blast Convict Welcomed (Gujarat) – Bhavesh Patel, convicted in the 2007 Ajmer Dargah blast, was given a grand celebration by BJP and VHP, normalising Hindutva-led terrorism.
• 2018: Minister Felicitates Lynching Convicts (Jharkhand) – Union Minister Jayant Sinha garlanded eight men convicted of lynching coal trader Alimuddin Ansari, highlighting state complicity in mob violence.
• 2018: Kathua Rape Case Protests (Jammu) – BJP leaders and Hindu Ekta Manch members organised rallies in support of men accused of the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl, exposing the communalisation of sexual violence.
• 2013: Muzaffarnagar Riots Accused Honoured (Uttar Pradesh) – BJP’s ‘Human Rights Cell’ felicitated Sangeet Som and Suresh Rana, accused of inciting communal riots that killed over 60 people and displaced thousands.
• 2018: Giriraj Singh Backs Riot-Accused (Bihar) – Union Minister Giriraj Singh visited Bajrang Dal and VHP members jailed for communal riots, portraying them as victims of political persecution.
• 2014: Hindutva Bravery Award for Murder Accused (Maharashtra) – Hindutva groups planned to honour Dhananjay Desai, Hindu Rashtra Sena leader accused of murdering Pune techie Mohsin Sheikh, reinforcing the veneration of violent extremists.

From political patronage to social media glorification, the infrastructure of Hindutva extremism ensures that those who commit violence against minorities, journalists, and rationalists are not just shielded but celebrated. The repeated public honouring of individuals accused or convicted of such crimes is not merely a law-and-order issue; it is a fundamental challenge to the fabric of Indian democracy.

The danger of normalising hate

The message sent by these acts of public glorification is clear: in today’s India, those who commit violence in the name of Hindutva are not just protected—they are exalted. By treating rapists, lynchers, and murderers as heroes, both convicted and accused, the Hindutva ecosystem is ensuring that such crimes will not only continue but will be carried out with even greater impunity.

The failure of the state to curb these displays of hate is a tacit endorsement of the growing culture of extremist violence. With each celebration of hate criminals, Hindutva forces are further emboldened, deepening the assault on secularism, diversity, and democracy itself. The question now is not just about whether justice will be served in individual cases—it is about whether India can still call itself a nation governed by the rule of law, or whether it has fully embraced mob rule in the name of Hindutva.

Related:

Bilkis Bano Case: Supreme Court strikes down remission for gang rape and murder convicts, citing flagrant violation of rule of law

Bilkis Bano gang rape convict shares stage with BJP MP, MLA: Gujarat

Remembering Gauri Lankesh, Renewing A Pledge

The post Honour for killers of Gauri Lankesh and MM Kalburgi in Karnataka, public felicitation and terms like “Hindu tigers” for accused Amit Baddi and Ganesh Miskin appeared first on SabrangIndia.

To reimagine India in Authoritarian times is to first and foremost truthfully bear witness to what is happening around us, to acknowledge the rifts being created, to name the injustices and cruelty and to call out the powers that divide.

We are here today to honour the memory of Gauri Lankesh who so bravely spoke truth to power and who even in death reminds us to bear truthful witness however painful that may be, and I am grateful and would like to say a thank you for being given this opportunity to be part of today’s very special and important gathering.

As I stand here in India, as we in the Northeast are fond of calling the country that lies beyond the chicken neck, I want to begin with a few introductions and disclaimers.

My name is Angela Rangad, I belong to the Matrilineal Khasi tribe of Meghalaya. I am also a beef eating, pork savouring Christian who also dips into the indigenous Khasi faith system for sustenance. I do not like to wear my religious and ethnic affiliations on my sleeve, but in today’s India, I feel it imperative to display my multi-layered identity of being a Christian and, a scheduled tribe minority woman, as a way of challenging those who wish us away.

When India got its independence in 1947, the self-governing, Khasi states that make up the major part of today’s Meghalaya, were unsure of joining the larger nation-state called India. And that was OK. There were attempts then, even at such a crucial juncture, of leaders both

Indian and Khasi considering this hesitation of the Khasi States and its people as something legitimate – to be acknowledged, debated and taken seriously.

Today, when representatives from our region are being silenced in the parliament, it is hard to imagine that Rev. JJM Nichols Roy confronted the majoritarian minded leaders of the

Constituent Assembly who openly wanted to assimilate the Tribals of India into their notion of a dominant Indian culture and society. He said

“It is said by one honourable gentleman that the hill tribes have to be brought to the culture which he said “Our culture” meaning the culture of the plains men. But what is culture? Does it mean dress or eating and drinking: if it means eating and drinking or ways of living, the hill tribes can claim that they have a better system than some of the people of the plains? I think the latter must rise up to their standard. Among the tribesmen there is no difference between class and class. Is that practised in the plains?”

Actively supported in the Constituent Assembly by visionary leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. Ambedkar, our leaders like Rev. J.J.M. Nichols Roy, Jaipal Singh Munda and others spoke fearlessly of the visions and aspirations of the small tribes and fought to ensure constitutional provisions of autonomy that became enshrined in the 5th and 6th schedule of the constitution.

The democracy that India envisaged for itself at its founding moment was not going to be just a brutality of numbers, but an everyday aspiration of many sovereignties and freedoms. I grew up listening to the stories about people from our hill, such as Mavis Dunn – one of the first women cabinet ministers in India who articulated both the desire for Khasi freedom and freedom of khasi women in front of the Bardoloi Committee. Stories of Wilson Reade, who gate crashed a meeting of Prime Minister Nehru, demanding provincial autonomy from Assam for the hill tribes. They did this without fear of reprisal or arrest. All of it seems like a dream now. Every day a new ideological horror is being perpetrated against all of us.

Seven decades on, that promise of the Constitution of India of ensuring open dialogues, of tentative relationships being OK, of the possibility of questioning being the edifice upon which our multi-cultural multi ethnic communities will determine their collective lives, is being undermined. Or in the words of Late L. G. Shullai, it is as if we have exchanged British India for Bharat India or the Hindu Rashtra being peddled today.

Today, we no longer refer to those who ought to be representing us as OUR govt. More and more we refer to those in power as The Regime. And this is telling. Regime – a word that conjures in our minds the feeling of being controlled, of having little choices and of being regimented into ONE uniform India.

For us from North East India, uniformity is an impossibility. And that is not only OK, but it has allowed us to thrive. With over 200 tribes having 300 plus languages and dialects between us, we contend with diverse cultural practices, customs and religions. A constellation of indigenous faiths and beliefs, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, heterodox Hinduism find expression across the region.

We are also a region that has, before maps got set and drawn, lived our relationships beyond the hills and rivers that defines India’s territoriality – which is why today when the military coup in Myanmar forced people to flee, the communities in states like Mizoram ensured refuge to them. Mizoram as a state, understanding the sentiment of a shared history and community relations extended a helping hand.

It is here that we find ourselves at odds with the regressive push of papering over these myriad and minute elements that define us. There can never be One Nation, One Law, One Belief to encapsulate our multi layered identities, relationships and ways of being.

Federalism as a key principle therefore, should not be emphasised merely as the sharing of powers between the union and the states but as an acknowledgement of the diversity within states and regions.

An acceptance that this experience of plural identities and relationships is best understood by those living it. If these local experiences and knowledge is what is allowed to inform policy and governance, the union of states as envisaged by the framers of our constitution would indeed become a reality.

The very idea of India where smaller communities like ours could have a political, economic and cultural voice seem distant now, under this regime. Although to be truthful, the relationship between India and its Northeast, very soon after independence, was sought to be turned into one of a patron-client relationship overseen by the security state, that process has now been further weaponised in favour of Delhi, and the Federal imagination is now being replaced by notions of double engine governments. For small states in the North East it is a reality that even when combined together we do not command legislative clout in terms of the number of representatives- and the number is set to further diminish if the proposed plans of delimitation go through. It is also a fact that for many North eastern states, our economies are crippled.

This dependency on the union has been used as a tool to put us in our place. An arm twisting that has pitted one neighbouring state against another and most crucially pushing communities and tribes to be wary and suspicious of each other. Double engine government has meant a replication of the divisive politics and hate that is on exhibition at the centre.

What is happening in Manipur today, is precisely this. A double engine government that is twice complicating the already complex histories and tenuous relationships among the people in this state. The Double Engine government has doubled the oppression, doubled the violence, and doubled the mistrust. The failure to contain the violence and hostilities for more than four months  now, clearly shows not only the total complicity of the double engine government but a glaring undermining, by design, of the federal guarantees of our constitution.

Manipur has also shown us how a regime can use communities – their sense of specialness and deprivation and the notions of majority to form blocks and cartels that can so easily be deployed for the larger sinister geo-political narratives and visions of an Akhand Bharat. I do not claim to be speaking on behalf of the people of Manipur, but after our recent visits there, many of us feel Manipur is a major experimentation in the region. A project to have a nation of majoritarian hate-filled cartels that will pave the way for easy access and exploitation of whatever resources the region may have by pitting communities against each other rather than allowing them their constant everyday messy negotiations, give and take and contradictions.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not here to glorify the region nor to romanticise its cultures, customs and practices. It has never been all love and fair play. There are fights. Claims and counterclaims. We have our fair share of looters, oppressors and patriarchs. However, if we are to reclaim our voices and spaces, we have to turn to our strength. That being our communities. The diversity and the entanglements which this diversity brings is what more than ever we will have to recognise, reclaim, embrace and work with. We cannot allow our communities to be used for a project that seeks to annihilate us. We as tribals cannot keep quiet when Dalits are targeted. We, as, Christians cannot allow our faith to be used to bring international legitimacy to a regime that persecutes our Muslim brothers and sisters. The Union of Communities needs to come together in solidarity of the MANY against ONE.

And, may I take this opportunity to also call out the so-called leaders in our north-eastern states who have played a politics of convenience for power and allowed themselves to be subsumed under majoritarian politicking. They have sold us out and sacrificed indigeneity, and even Christ at the altar of greed. It is a myth that Meghalaya or Nagaland or Mizoram is being led by regional parties. What we have is BJP-lite. Even as we rejected the BJP in the elections, we have BJP directed governments. The Prime Minister merely throws us representational crumbs in images of him with cultural symbols like headgear and tribal fabric wrapped around his neck or badly mouthing local language greetings from an auto-cue, while his government passes laws like the Forest Conservation Amendment Act that blatantly takes away our land and forests from our control.

We, as citizens, seem to be losing control over everything that makes a country ours. And At a time in our history when our institutions have been hollowed out, legislative processes hijacked and our ideals of liberty, equality and secularism are being held to ransom I hold on to some of my Khasi ideals as my personal existential weapon. For a khasi there are two important principles that are supposed to guide one’s life. Tip Briew – Tip Blei and Kamai Ia Ka Hok. Tip Briew – Tip Blei literally translates into” knowing humanity is knowing god”.

When the lens of humanity is being systematically blurred out and broken and when the decade long assertion of majoritarianism with its culture of impunity and hate filled mobs tearing us apart – we have to piece it back together with the Khasi principle of Tip Briew – Tip Blei. Knowing and embracing humanity forces us to be reflexive and there can be no Vishwa Guru greater that a self that is directed by an understanding, acceptance and compassion for another.

Kamai Ia ka Hok means to earn Righteousness. To live a life not of greed but of communitarian sufficiency. Today, when it has become difficult to distinguish Govt. from big capital and when corruption has been Adani – ised and development no longer remains a consultative process but a diktat, emphasising on the other khasi principle and praxis of Kamai la ka Hok becomes even more relevant.

So, may I end by imploring all of us present today to Tip Briew – Tip Blei, to Kamai Ia ka Hok and to constantly remind ourselves that the India of today is not our destiny. Together, we must continue to rage against the imprisonment we all feel. We need to constantly ask – Do we want to second guess ourselves all the time? To look over our shoulder and worry about the names we have? Can’t we enjoy a train ride the way we used to? Can’t we sit at a table and share our cuisines and joke about the smelly foods that some of us consume? Can’t we draw strength?

From each other – from the farmers and what they achieved at the borders of Delhi? Can’t we look south – to the peoples of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and imbibe their sense of self to stand up against bullies, Can’t we borrow courage from Kashmiris imagining a world beyond the prison bars and from a subjugated northeast that continues to draw breath?

Can’t we have a life like a river – we meander, we change course, we ebb and flow, we nurture, we even sometimes destroy but we move forward always with the promise of the expanse of an ocean awaiting…

The author, a political activist from Meghalaya wrote this for a memorial held at Town Hall, Bengaluru, September 5, 2023, 5-8 p.m.

Related:

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

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Gauri Lankesh Assassination: Accused denied bail by Aurangabad HC

Remembering Gauri Lankesh, Renewing A Pledge

Five years since we lost Gauri Lankesh

The post TO BE LIKE RIVERS- Reimagining India in Authoritarian Times, a soul cry from India’s North East appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Gauri was found by friends and then family lying in a pool of blood. This brutal killing had shaken the  conscience of the people and led to support for condolence meets and protests across the length and breadth of India. . It is now almost certain that right-wing extremists targeted Gauri – an icon  whose every word, every sentence she wrote, was targeted at the growing communalism, injustice, and equality in the country.

Gauri’s was the last in the long line of four such similar assassinations of rationalists, Narendra Dabholkar (August 20, 2013), Govind O Pansare (February 2015) and MM Kalburgi (August 28, 2015).

Each of these were and are in their own way known for bold and humanely rational stands against growing authoritarianism.

Gauri Memorial dialogue

Each year, even as the gruesome assassination of Gauri Lankesh appears to be fading away from public memory, the morning’s graveyard tributes at her samadhi (Lingayat Rudrabhumi at Chamarpet) is a sombre reminder of all that has been lost and all that lives on. Apart from family and friends, over 100  activists and representatives of movements gathered this morning from 7.30 a.m. onwards in joy-filled sorrowful tribute.

Each year, January 29 (2018 onwards) or September 5, the day Gauri was slain, the Gauri Memorial Trust (formed after her killing) organises dialogues, marches, protests and events that symbolise what Gauri Kankesh fought, lived and died for.

This year, the Gauri Memorial Trust has organised a dialogue on “Remembering India In Authoritarian Times” on her death anniversary to mark the 6th year of Gauri’s assassination at Town Hall in Bengaluru.

Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah, a friend of Gauri Lankesh, farmers’ leader Rakesh Tikait, Angela G Rangad – political activist, Meghalaya, noted actor and political activist Prakash Raj, political leader KK Shylaja, former journalist Supriya Shinate and Muslim leader Vasin Malpe are expected to participate in the discussions. Farmer’s leader Tikait, accompanied by colleagues from Rajasthan and Punjab also paid tributes this morning at the Rudrabhumi.

Apex court’s observation

Six years after the crime, the trial  into Gauri’s assassination case seems to be progressing at a snail’s pace. The court is once a week, dedicated to this case. The recent Supreme Court’s order on August 19, asking the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to look into a larger conspiracy in the killings of Dabholkar, Pansare, MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh, has brought the chilling assassination of Gauri and Kalburgi to the fore again.

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Demand for special court

Kavitha Lankesh, sister of Gauri Lanlkesh and other members of the Gauri Memorial Trust, are also concerned at the pace of the trial. Presently, of the 19 accused, 18 are already behind bars, after the filing of the chargesheet. Of the 400 plus eyewitnesses in the court, examination of over 80has been completed, he added.

Today there are discussions among Gauri’s friends and family members who are considering urging the government to constitute a Special Court to hear Gauri’s case. The demand has not been met so far. With the Congress government returning to power in Karnataka, it is to be seen whether chief minister Siddaramaiah, in whose earlier term Gauri was assassinated, will take the initiative in constituting a special court.”

Documentaries on Gauri

Pradeep KP, a Bengaluru-based media activist, also known as Pradeep Deepu of Pedestrian Pictures, made a 67-minute documentary, ‘Our Gauri’, in September 2017. Deepu extensively used various footage he collected over 16 years and completed his film ‘Our Gauri’ in just 20 days. This documentary has been shown in more than 600 screens across the country.

Kavitha Lankesh, a woman filmmaker, who has made a name for herself in Indian cinema, has made another documentary on her sister Gauri, which is different from Deepu’s documentary in terms of treatment. Initially, Kavitha wanted to make a full-length feature film on Gauri, (In fact, she still wants to do that). However, after a call by Free Press Unlimited, Kavitha made a documentary simply titled ‘Gauri’.

Awards galore for ‘Gauri’

This documentary won the Best Human Rights Film award at the Toronto Women’s Film Festival (TWIFF) in 2022. ‘Gauri’ won the Best Long Documentary Award at the South Asian Film Festival of Montreal. Juries observed that the film is , “a brave and uncompromising pulse-taking of current crisis in Indian politics, focusing on the 2017 political assassination of trailblazing Bengaluru journalist Gauri Lankesh”. ‘Gauri’ has screened at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, Sundance Film Festival and other film festivals across the globe.

Sister’s  documentary

Kavitha scripted and shot the film for Free Press Unlimited, while fighting to get justice for her sister Gauri, tapping the doors of state machinery and judiciary.

‘Gauri’ has a larger canvas than the earlier documentary which had been made in the heat of the moment, and is more intense. It speaks about the radical, ideological and political positions of Gauri. Kavitha shot the documentary in various parts of the country where Gauri worked in her career as a journalist and left her footprints.

Besides delineating the radical, ideological and political positions of Gauri, the film narrates Gauri’s struggle for freedom of expression by upholding the rights of the oppressed classes, besides fighting strong divisive forces in the country. It also speaks intensely about certain issues, which may trigger a backlash from Hindutva fundamentalist forces.

Three important highlights of Gauri’s activism, such as her fight against the communalisation of Bababudangiri Sufi shrine; and her protests to oppose the displacement of tribals in the Diddalli area of Kodagu region and Kudremukh National Park are vividly visualised in this documentary. The film also traces the network of Hindu fundamentalists responsible for the elimination of Gauri, from Belagavi to Goa and Maharashtra.

It is Esha Lankesh’s (daughter of Kavitha) words before the documentary ends that make the audience emotional. When the documentary was screened for a selected audience last year, tears filled the eyes of those who watched the film, when they exited from the theatre. The documentary connects emotionally to everyone who knows even a bit about Gauri.

Formation of SIT (2017-2018)

Meanwhile, the Congress government, headed by Siddaramaiah, had asked the Karnataka DGP and IGP to constitute a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the killing of Gauri. The SIT probe was headed by an Inspector General officer. Siddaramaiah had also declared then that the government had an “open mind” for a CBI investigation, a demand made by Gauri’s family.

The presence of CCTV camera footage for a mere four seconds was the only clue the SIT had for the first three months after its investigation into the case. Instead of waiting for some substantial clue, SIT launched a massive surveillance exercise to find something as concrete evidence.

Trailing the accused

On September 13, 2017,  the Karnataka Forensic Science Laboratory’s ballistic report concluded that Gauri Lankesh was killed with the same gun used to kill scholar M M Kalburgi in Dharwad in 2015. Based on that finding, the SIT started studying the activities of radical right-wing activists by the end of September. This was because the CBI probe in the Dabholkar case and the Maharashtra SIT probe in the Pansare case had suggested the involvement of activists linked to the radical outfit, Sanatan Sanstha and its affiliate Hindu Jagarana Samithi (HJS) in the two murders in Maharashtra.

In January 2018, the SIT intercepted telephone conversations of Hindu Yuva Sena and HJS-linked activist K T Naveen Kumar with reference to involvement in Gauri’s murder and planned to carry out another murder. Naveen Kumar was arrested for the possession of illegal arms in February 2018 and in connection with Gauri’s murder case. In May 2018, the SIT tracked down Sujith Kumar, a former HJS activist on whose instruction Naveen Kumar was trying to get a gun. According to reports, Sujith Kumar and others were planning to carry out the murder of another rationalist K S Bhagavan.

Arrest after arrest

Based on information obtained from Sujith Kumar, SIT arrested three men – Amol Kale, Amit Degwekar and Manohar Yadave from Vijayapura in May 2018. All three were arrested after finding rough maps of Gauri’s home and details of weapons and a recce in their dairies.

Subsequently, on June 12, 2018 Parashuram Waghmare, a Sri Rama Sena activist, was arrested and identified as Gauri’s shooter on the basis of Kale’s diary. Likewise, in July 2018, Ganesh Miskin, the alleged bike rider who had transported the shooter to Gauri’s home was arrested along with Rajesh Bangera, an alleged arms trainer.

In August, Suresh HL, a former HJS man who allegedly sheltered the killers and stored the guns after the murder, was arrested. Similarly, Bharat Kane, Sharad Kalaksar and Sudhanva Gondhalekar, Shrikanth Pangarkar, Vasudeva Suryavamshi were arrested in connection with the case in the next three months.

The SIT filed its first chargesheet naming alleged gun runner and Hindutva activist T Naveen Kumar as an accused. The 650-page chargesheet was filed before the First Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate on May 30, 2018. SIT filed a 10,000-page additional chargesheet in the Gauri murder case against 18 persons on November 23, 2018.

Related:

Gauri, a film on journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh wins international award: Montreal 2023

Gauri Lankesh Assassination: Accused denied bail by Aurangabad HC

Remembering Gauri Lankesh, Renewing A Pledge

Five years since we lost Gauri Lankesh

The post Gauri Lankesh assassination: 6 years down, no closure for family and friends, justice elusive appeared first on SabrangIndia.

On October 21, the High Court of Karnataka denied “default bail” to an accused in the murder of renowned journalist Gauri Lankesh. The accused, a businessman from Aurangabad, Maharashtra had sought to challenge the lower court ruling on the issue. Hrishikesh Devdikar, a businessman from Aurangabad of Maharashtra had been detained and placed in judicial custody in January 2020. Later, he submitted an application to the Special court for “statutory/default bail” under section 167(2) of the Criminal Procedure Code.

Devdikar claimed that no supplementary charge sheet was filed against him even 90 days after his arrest before the high court. However, the petitioner fled and was impossible to nab throughout the investigation, according to the special public prosecutor. The SPP reports that several new charge sheets have been submitted in the case. He noted that the petitioner was named in the initial charge sheet from 2018—even before the arrest. The court therefore rejected the statutory bail application of the accused. Pursuant to this, he appealed to the High Court to challenge he lower court’s order.

On October 21, Justice Suraj Govindaraj dismissed the plea, finding that the charge sheet had already been filed when the accused was detained. Therefore,he found the accused not eligible for seeking reliefs under Section 167 of the CrPC, subsection (2).

“An accused would not be entitled to the benefit under Subsection (2) of Section 167 of CrPC, in the event of charges sheet having already been filed before his arrest,” the judge said.

“I am of the considered opinion that in the present case, charge sheet having been laid against the petitioner even prior to the arrest of the petitioner, the petitioner having been arraigned as an accused and charged with certain offence, I am of the considered opinion that the benefit of Subsection (2) of Section 167 of CrPc would not arise,” he added.

“In my considered opinion as dealt with hereinabove, the fact of the accused absconding or delaying the investigation during the period of he being absconding would not be relevant for consideration of application Subsection (2) of Section 167 of CrPC,” the court further noted.

Background of the case:

Gauri Lankesh was highly respected for not only her fearless journalism, but also her work in advocating communal harmony, the rights of women, and persons from historically oppressed communities. Her killers, all allegedly affiliated to different right wing extremist organisations, wanted to silence her for her secular views and her stand against hardline groups that spread communal hate.

The trial in her assassination case began on July 4 before a special Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act (KCOCA) court. As per directions of Special Judge CM Joshi, hearings take place every second week of the month for five days. Hearings are all set to resume this month.

Gauri’s sister Kavitha Lankesh who is a poet and filmmaker was one of the first people to testify in the case. Other witnesses who have testified so far include a cable operator who arrived at the spot shortly after Gauri Lankesh’s assassination, a neighbour who saw the shooters fleeing the spot, a witness who told the court about a meeting between some of the accused, a forensic science lab technician and a police officer.

The probe, the chargesheet and the arrests:  The probe was conducted by the Karnataka Special Investigation Team (SIT) who filed two chargesheets. The primary charge sheet was filed against KT Naveen Kumar, a 37-year-old member of the Hindu Yuva Sena on May 30, 2018. On November 23, 2018 the supplementary charge sheet running into 9,235 pages was filed. 18 people were named in the charge sheet, including alleged shooter Parashuram Waghmare, and alleged masterminds Amol Kale, Sujith Kumar alias Praveen and Amit Digwekar. It was in this charge sheet that the Sanatan Sanstha was mentioned for the first time. So far, 17 people have been arrested while one of the accused remains absconding.

According to the Karnataka Special Investigation Team) SIT, the plot to kill Lankesh was hatched a year before the assassination. Amol Kale, a former Hindu Janjagruti Samiti (HJS) convener, allegedly hired killer Parshuram Waghmare. Waghamare was allegedly a member of the Sri Ram Sene. Kale took him to an isolated spot in Khanapur, Belgaum to practice using an air pistol. Waghmare allegedly did a recce of Lankesh’s house in Rajarajeshwari Nagar in July 2017. On September 5, he and another back-up gunman Ganesh Miskin arrived outside Lankesh’s house on a black motorcycle. Waghmare fired four times at Lankesh and the duo fled the scene.

However, the group responsible came together in 2010-11 suggesting that this was a wider conspiracy planned over a longer period aiming to eliminate more rationalists, journalists and activists. In a press release the SIT had said, “The investigation so far has revealed that all the 18 accused are active members of an organised crime syndicate. This syndicate was formed in 2010-11, under the leadership of Virendra Tawade alias Bade Bhaisaab. One former editor of ‘Sanatan Prabhat’ provided financial support to this syndicate. The members of this organisation targeted people who they identified to be inimical to their belief and ideology. The members strictly followed the guidelines and principles mentioned in ‘Kshatra Dharma Sadhana’, a book published by Sanatan Sanstha.” The statement further added, “In August 2016, in a meeting of the syndicate, the main members identified Ms. Lankesh as a “durjan” as told in the ‘Kshatra Dharma Sadhana’, based on her speeches and writings. They jointly hatched a conspiracy to murder her.”

On March 2, 2018, the SIT arested right-wing activist K. T. Naveen Kumar, of Maddur, who in 2015 founded the Hindu Yuva Sene. Kumar who reportedly confessed to Lankesh’s murder had previously been arrested in February 2018 in relation to a case involving illegal arms. Kumar allegedly obtained the bullets that were used to kill Gauri Lankesh, and that he allegedly supplied logistical support to her killers and directed them to her residence and office in Bengaluru.

In late May 2018, the SIT arrested four more people with ties to right-wing group Sanatan Sanstha for a January 2018 conspiracy to kill K. S. Bhagwan. The four individuals also had ties to Sanatan Sanstha’s sister outfit, the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), and were also connected to Kumar, in 2017 had attended multiple HJS meetings. They were Amol Kale alias Bhaisab, an HJS activist from Maharashtra, Amit Degwekar alias Pradeep, a Sanatan Sanstha activist from Goa, Manohar Edave of Karnataka, and Sujeet Kumar alias Praveen, an activist with Sanatan Sanstha and the HJS from Mangalore.

On June 11, 2018 the sixth accused in the case, 26-year-old Parashuram Waghmare, was arrested. On Thursday, June 14, police reportedly interrogated Waghmare and the previously arrested Amol Kale. Waghmare had allegedly claimed that Kale instructed him to carry out the killing, and gave him a country-made pistol.

Sharad Kalaskar was arrested on August 10, 2018 by the Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) after a tip off from the Karnataka Special Investigation Team (SIT) which was probing the Gauri Lankesh murder case. The ATS claims that Kalaskar was also one of the two gunmen who shot and killed Narendra Dabholkar in August 2013. According to the ATS, the weapon used to kill Gauri Lankesh and other rationalists was also procured and manufactured by Kalaskar.

A note on how to make bombs was also recovered from him. Kalaskar was arrested along with Vaibhav Raut and Sudhanwa Gondhalekar from the Nallasopara home of Raut who is the convener of the Hindu Govansh Raksha Samiti. 20 crude bombs and two gelatin sheets were recovered during this raid. Meanwhile, Gondhalekar is a member of Shiv Shivapratishthan Hindustan, an organisation run by none other than Shambhaji Bhide, one of the two main accused in the Bhima Koregaon violence.

In July 2019, Uma Devi, wife of slain rationalist MM Kalburgi identified the gunman who shot her husband. Earlier the SIT had arrested Praveen Chatur, a Belgavi resident who had allegedly ferried this gunman in the Kalburgi murder. While police had initially suspected Amit Baddi, a friend of Ganesh Miskin, of being the biker, sketches prepared by police artists did not match eye witness descriptions. When the SIT probed the matter again, interrogation of Amol Kale pointed them towards Chatur. Chatur was also wanted in a petrol bomb attack on a theater screening Padmavat in Belgavi in January. He has now turned state’s witness in the Gauri Lankesh case. In his statement he has reportedly admitted to attending training camps in Jalna and Mangaluru.

Rishikesh Dewarkar was the last one to be arrested in the case so far. Dewarkar who also went by the alias Rajesh was arrested from Katras town in Dhanbad district of Jharkhand in January 2020. He had been on the run ever since the assassination and had been laying low, working at a petrol pump in Katras for several months under an assumed identity.

Proceedings at previous hearings: As SabrangIndia had reported previously, Gauri Lankesh’s sister Kavita Lankesh, who is a filmmaker and poet, made her statement before the court when the hearings began on July 4, and said that just days before her murder, Gauri Lankesh had seen some men “loitering suspiciously” near her home in Bengaluru. She also said that it was she who discovered Gauri’s bullet ridden body in a pool of blood.

But the counsel for the defence wanted to spin an entirely different narrative. During her cross examination, Kavita was asked about family feuds instead. She was also asked about Gauri’s alleged “Naxalite connections”. At one point the defence counsel also mentioned Gauri Lankesh’s connections to the activists who have been dubbed the “tukde-tukde gang”, namely Jignesh Mewani and Kanhaiya Kumar. But this line of questioning was shot down by the court.

In July, the court also examined other witnesses including a cable operator who had been called to rectify the cable in Lankesh’s home, but found her dead outside her door instead. Another eye-witness, a mason whose wife was employed as a security guard in the building opposite Lankesh’s residence was also examined. He told the court, he heard gun shots when he came back home from work that day, and rushed to the spot, reported The New Indian Express. 

When the hearing ended on July 8, the counsel for the accused told the court that they had not been given footage from CCTV cameras outside Lankesh’s residence yet. It was this footage that had helped the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to identify and apprehend the shooters. On Monday, July 18, the Special Public Prosecutor handed over the footage from two CCTV cameras outside slain journalist Gauri Lankesh’s house to the legal team of the accused. 

In August, four witnessed deposed before the court. A neighbour (names of witnesses withheld as per directions of the court) of Lankesh testified that he was cooking at home when he heard the gunshots. Times of India quoted excerpts from his testimony: “I ran to the front door and opened it. When I was near the gate, I saw two men riding away on a black Passion Pro motorbike in Subhash Park direction. The rider and the pillion were wearing full-face helmets.” The neighbour also identified the bike used by the assailants that had been seized by the police. He told the court that when he and his roommate rushed outside the bike borne assassins fled, but that’s when a cable operator arrived. This is the same cable operator who had deposed before the court previously.

Another witness told the court that he had met key accused KT Naveen Kumar (A-17) at a park in Vijayanagar, and that two of the accused – Naveen Kumar and Sujith Kumar – had discussed a plan to murder the journalist, reported Hindustan Times.

Other witnesses to depose before the court included a woman staffer from a lab in Shantinagar and two policemen. The lab technician told the court that the police had given them CCTV footage on a DVR on September 6, and the lab downloaded the visuals and returned the DVR the same day.

Another witness to depose before the court was Head constable Shivaswamy H, who reportedly told the court that it was “police inspector Shiva Reddy took a written statement from Kavita Lankesh at the spot” and then gave it to him. He then handed it to sub inspector Laxman who drafted the First Information Report (FIR).

Related:

Gauri Lankesh case: Neighbour identifies bike used by shooters

Gauri Lankesh case: Hearings to resume before KCOCA Court today

Gauri Lankesh case: CCTV footage shared with counsel for the accused

Gauri Lankesh case: Why is the Defence harping on alleged “Naxalite connections”, family fued?

Gauri Lankesh case: SC restores KCOCA charges against Mohan Nayak

Gauri Lankesh case: SC reserves order on plea to keep KCOCA charges against accused

Gauri Lankesh case: SC to decide on keeping KCOCA charges against accused

Gauri Lankesh case: CJP assists sister Kavitha move SC

The post Gauri Lankesh Assassination: Accused denied bail by Aurangabad HC appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A special court for the Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act (KCOCA) has set October 30 as the date for framing charges against 17 out of the 18 accused in the case. Journalist Gauri Lankesh was gunned down outside her home in Rajarajeshwari Nagar in Bangalore on September 5, 2017. With a date set for framing charges, the hurdles towards commencing the trial appear to have been finally removed.

The KCOCA Court is all set to frame charges after the Supreme Court restored charges under KCOCA for accused Mohan Nayak. Earlier the Karnataka High Court had dropped these charges, but last week the SC observed that the HC had “glossed over core and tangible facts”. This was after Gauri’s sister and filmmaker Kavitha Lankesh had filed a Special Leave Petition (SLP) before the SC with the help of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), challenging the HC order.

Key accused in the case

The said incident came under the jurisdiction of Rajarajeshwari Nagar police station of Bangalore City and on the same day an FIR was registered under Sections 302, 120(B), 114, 118, 109, 201, 203, 204, 35 of I.P.C. and Sections 25(1), 25(1B), 27(1) of the Indian Arms Act, 1959 and Sessions 3(1)(i), 3(2), 3(3) and 3(4) of the COCA Act, 2000 (Order No.C.R.M./01/158/BC/2017-18 dated 06-09-2017 of the D.G. and I.G.P.) as Crime No. 221/2017. Gauri Lankesh’s sister, Kavitha Lankesh is the first informant in the case.

The Karnataka Special Investigation Team (SIT) began probing the case. According to the Karnataka SIT, the plot to kill Lankesh was hatched a year before the assassination. Two chargesheets were filed in the case. The primary chargesheet was filed against KT Naveen Kumar, a 37-year-old member of the Hindu Yuva Sena on May 30, 2018. On November 23, 2018 the supplementary chargesheet running into 9,235 pages was filed. 18 people have reportedly been named in the chargesheet. These include shooter Parashuram Waghmare, masterminds Amol Kale, Sujith Kumar alias Praveen and Amit Digwekar.

This second chargesheet was significant, not only because it named the Sanatan Sanstha for the first time, but also because it revealed that 26 other rationalists, eminent journalists, educationists and intellectuals who are perceived to be anti-Hindu by the Sanatan Sanstha, were on a hitlist of sorts. These include Siddharth Varadrajan (Editor, The Wire), journalist Antara Dev Sen, JNU professor Chaman Lal, Punjabi playwright Atamjit Singh among others.

Three of the accused in the Gauri Lankesh murder case are also linked to the plot to kill anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar. Dabholkar was shot dead on August 20, 2013. The same weapon was used in both crimes according to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Sachin Andure, one of the alleged shooters of Dabholkar, was arrested by the CBI and has been remanded to judicial custody. Meanwhile, his co-accused Rajesh Bangera and Amit Digvekar have also been remanded to judicial custody. Bangera had allegedly provided weapons training to Andure and Sharad Kalaskar, the two men who allegedly shot Narendra Dabholkar. Meanwhile Digvekar had helped recon Dabholkar’s house and keep tabs on his movement and routine. Digvekar was also a ‘saadhak’ in the Sanatan Sanstha.

Kavitha Lankesh’s SLP

Lankesh’s SLP before the SC detailed the nature and extent of Nayak’s involvement saying that investigations had found that Nayak had been “actively involved in providing shelter to the killers prior to and after committing the offence and has participated in a series of conspiracies, abetting, planning, providing logistics.” This fulfils the condition of being involved in “continuous unlawful activity” which is vital for being charged under relevant sections of the KCOCA.

The SLP further stated that the police have collected sufficient evidence “to connect him with the case and establish his intimate nexus with the master mind behind the entire event i.e. Accused No.1 Amol Kale and master arms trainer Accused No. 8 Rajesh D. Bangera who are part and parcel of an “organized crime syndicate” from its inception.”

The court saw merit in the Police Commissioner’s decision to grant permission to register a case under KCOCA and said that at the time the permission was sought, “the Commissioner of Police had focussed only on the factum of information regarding the commission of organized crime by an organized crime syndicate and on being prima facie satisfied about the presence of material on record in that regard, rightly proceeded to accord prior approval for invoking Section 3 of the 2000 Act. The prior approval was not for registering crime against individual offenders as such, but for recording of information regarding commission of an offence of organized crime under the 2000 Act. Therefore, the specific role of the concerned accused is not required to be and is not so mentioned in the stated prior approval. That aspect would be unravelled during the investigation, after registration of offence of organized crime.”

The court therefore observed, “The High Court, thus, examined the matter by applying erroneous scale. The observations made by the High Court in the impugned judgment clearly reveal that it has glossed over the core and tangible facts.” Expressing further disapproval with the HC’s reasoning in the impugned judgment, the SC said, “Notably, the High Court, without analysing the material presented along with chargesheet on the basis of which cognizance has been taken by the competent Court including against the writ petitioner­Mohan Nayak.N, concerning commission of organized crime by the organized crime syndicate of which he is allegedly a member, committed manifest error and exceeded its jurisdiction in quashing the chargesheet filed before the competent Court qua the writ petitioner ­ Mohan Nayak. N regarding offences under Section 3(1)(i), 3(2), 3(3) and 3(4) of the 2000 Act.”

The court therefore ruled, that the appeals were allowed and, “The impugned judgment and order dated 22.04.2021 passed by the High Court is set aside and the writ petition filed by Mohan Nayak.N stands dismissed.”

Related:

HC glossed over core and tangible facts: SC in Kavitha Lankesh SLP

Gauri Lankesh case: SC restores KCOCA charges against Mohan Nayak

Gauri Lankesh case: SC reserves order on plea to keep KCOCA charges against accused

Gauri Lankesh case: SC to decide on keeping KCOCA charges against accused

Gauri Lankesh case: CJP assists sister Kavitha move SC

The post Gauri Lankesh Case: Charges to be framed against 17 accused on Oct 30 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image: Deccan Herald/Prashanth HG
 

In a huge relief for friends and family of Gauri Lankesh, the Supreme Court overturned a Karnataka High Court judgment that had previously dropped organised crime charges under the Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act (KCOCA) against Mohan Nayak, one of the accused on the assassination of the fearless journalist. Gauri’s sister and filmmaker Kavitha Lankesh had filed a Special Leave Petition (SLP) before the SC with the help of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), challenging the HC order.

Points raised in the SLP

Lankesh’s SLP before the SC detailed the nature and extent of Nayak’s involvement saying that investigations had found that Nayak had been “actively involved in providing shelter to the killers prior to and after committing the offence and has participated in a series of conspiracies, abetting, planning, providing logistics.” This fulfils the condition of being involved in “continuous unlawful activity” which is vital for being charged under relevant sections of the KCOCA.

The SLP further stated that the police have collected sufficient evidence “to connect him with the case and establish his intimate nexus with the master mind behind the entire event i.e. Accused No.1 Amol Kale and master arms trainer Accused No. 8 Rajesh D. Bangera who are part and parcel of an “organized crime syndicate” from its inception.”

After the SIT concluded its investigation, the Chief Investigating Officer had sought the Bengaluru Commissioner of Police’s permission on August 7, 2018, to invoke section 3 of KCOCA against the accused. This section deals with punishment for persons involved in organised crime. The permission was granted on August 14, 2018.

Explaining how various charges under KCOCA came to be levelled against Nayak (Respondent No.6) , the SLP says, “After completion of the investigation, the ADGP and Commissioner of Police, Bengaluru accorded sanction under Section 24(2) KCOCA. Thereafter, the final report came to be filed on 23.11.2018 before the Special Court at Bengaluru on which cognizance of the offence was taken. Supplementary charge-sheet came to be filed against Respondent No. 6 before the 1st Addl. City Civil and Sessions Court in Spl. CC No. 872/2018 under Sections 302, 120(B), 114, 118, 109, 201, 203, 204, 35 IPC and Sections 25(1) 25(1B) 27(1) of the Arms Act and Sections 3 (1)(I), 3(2), 3(3), 3(4) KCOCA.”

Following this, in 2018 itself, Nayak had moved Karnataka High Court challenging the invocation of KCOCA charges against him, but in February 2019, the HC held that the charges were valid as Nayak was a member of an organised crime syndicate. That’s when Nayak moved HC again asking for quashing of the Bengaluru Police Commissioner’s order dated August 14, 2018 that permitted investigations under KCOCA in the first place. The Karnataka HC by way of an order dated April 22, 2021 quashed the order thus paving the way for KCOCA charges to be dropped against Nayak and this in turn led him to apply for bail.

Therefore, there were two key points raised in the SLP. Firstly, the SLP points out that the “Hon’ble High Court erred in not examining the scheme of Section 24 KCOCA which states that prior approval ought not to be granted by any officer below the rank of Additional Director General of Police which has been duly complied with in the present case.”

Secondly, the SLP also notes, “The Hon’ble High Court also failed to appreciate the fact that the sanction order under Section 24(2) KCOCA has neither been challenged nor assailed before the Hon’ble High Court. It is pertinent to point out herein that it is only the order under Section 24(1)(a) KCOCA which has been challenged.”

Supreme Court’s observations

In its judgment passed on October 21, 2021, the SC referred to Section 24 (1) (a) of the KCOCA. As per this section, “Notwithstanding anything contained in the Code, no information about the commission of an offence of organised crime under this Act shall be recorded by a police officer without the prior approval of the police officer not below the rank of the Deputy Inspector General of Police.”

The SC observed, “What is crucial in this provision is the factum of recording of offence of organized crime and not of recording of a crime against an offender as such. Further, the right question to be posed at this stage is: whether prior approval accorded by the competent authority under Section 24(1)(a) is valid? In that, whether there was discernible information about commission of an offence of organized crime by known and unknown persons as being members of the organized crime syndicate? Resultantly, what needed to be enquired into by the appropriate authority (in the present case, Commissioner of Police) is: whether the factum of commission of offence of organized crime by an organized crime syndicate can be culled out from the material placed before him for grant of prior approval? That alone is the question to be enquired into even by the Court at this stage.”

It added, “It is cardinal to observe that only after registration of FIR, investigation for the concerned offence would proceed — in which the details about the specific role and the identity of the persons involved in such offence can be unravelled and referred to in the chargesheet to be filed before the competent Court.”

The court saw merit is the Police Commissioner’s decision to grant permission to register a case under KCOCA and said that at the time the permission was sought, “the Commissioner of Police had focussed only on the factum of information regarding the commission of organized crime by an organized crime syndicate and on being prima facie satisfied about the presence of material on record in that regard, rightly proceeded to accord prior approval for invoking Section 3 of the 2000 Act. The prior approval was not for registering crime against individual offenders as such, but for recording of information regarding commission of an offence of organized crime under the 2000 Act. Therefore, the specific role of the concerned accused is not required to be and is not so mentioned in the stated prior approval. That aspect would be unravelled during the investigation, after registration of offence of organized crime.”

The court therefore observed, “The High Court, thus, examined the matter by applying erroneous scale. The observations made by the High Court in the impugned judgment clearly reveal that it has glossed over the core and tangible facts.” Expressing further disapproval with the HC’s reasoning in the impugned judgment, the SC said, “Notably, the High Court, without analysing the material presented along with chargesheet on the basis of which cognizance has been taken by the competent Court including against the writ petitioner­Mohan Nayak.N, concerning commission of organized crime by the organized crime syndicate of which he is allegedly a member, committed manifest error and exceeded its jurisdiction in quashing the chargesheet filed before the competent Court qua the writ petitioner ­ Mohan Nayak. N regarding offences under Section 3(1)(i), 3(2), 3(3) and 3(4) of the 2000 Act.”

The court therefore ruled, that the appeals were allowed and, “The impugned judgment and order dated 22.04.2021 passed by the High Court is set aside and the writ petition filed by Mohan Nayak.N stands dismissed.”

The entire order may be read here: 

Related:

Gauri Lankesh case: SC restores KCOCA charges against Mohan Nayak

Gauri Lankesh case: SC reserves order on plea to keep KCOCA charges against accused

Gauri Lankesh case: SC to decide on keeping KCOCA charges against accused

Gauri Lankesh case: CJP assists sister Kavitha move SC

The post Karnataka HC glossed over core and tangible facts: SC in Kavitha Lankesh SLP appeared first on SabrangIndia.

On September 5, 2017, Parshuram Waghmare, a member of Sri Ram Sene and Miskin who was allegedly serving as a back-up gun man arrived outside Lankesh’s home on a black motorcycle. Waghmare allegedly shot at Lankesh four times and the duo fled the scene. He was arrested by the Karnataka CID in connection with the Kalburgi case in 2018 after it emerged that he was connected to both cases.

MM Kalburgi a well-known rationalist was allegedly murdered in cold blood on August 30, 2015, by two men, Miskin and Praveen Prakash Chatur. One of them rang the doorbell and Uma Devi answered. He asked for Kalburgi and shot him dead as soon as he came to the door. Other witnesses had earlier identified Chatur as a rider waiting on a motorcycle.

It is also noteworthy that the weapon used in the Kalburgi case is the same as that was used to kill another eminent intellectual and rationalist Goving Pansare. Also, three of the accused in the Gauri Lankesh murder case are also linked to the plot to kill anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar. Dabholkar was shot dead on August 20, 2013. The same weapon was used in both crimes according to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
 

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