Her lawyer B T Venkatesh is clear that the killing was a sinister and pre-planned act by ‘Hindu terror units’, and not linked to the defamation cases against her.Exactly two years and five days after the fatal shooting of writer M M Kalburgi, the dastardly killing of journalist and editor Gauri Lankesh yesterday is being seen as a clear indication that Hindutva forces are still at work, chillingly picking out the targets on their list of intellectuals and writers inimical to them.

While a number of theories have sprung up on the motives for the killing, including her conviction in a defamation case filed by Dharwad’s BJP MP, Prahlaad Joshi and a BJP leader Umesh Dushi in November 2016, her lawyer B T Venkatesh is clear that the killing was a sinister and pre-planned act by ‘Hindu terror units’.

“Let us say it loud and clear. Hindu terror units killed Gauri Lankesh. She opposed the RSS, the BJP and these hindutva forces and this killing is the silencing of that voice against hate politics. It had nothing to do with all the defamation cases filed against her”, said Adv Venkatesh.

Talking to The Hoot a day after the killing, he said Lankesh had umpteen number of cases across the state. “I have been defending her in a number of these cases. This case was a small one in Hubbali and we appealed within 30 days and the sentence was suspended”, he said.

This was a very systematically organized and planned assassination that was carried out in an identical manner to the killing of Prof Kalburgi, he said, adding that hindutva terror units had recruited people and organized sleeper cells to carry out their killings. “Even Prof Kalburgi had something like 20 defamation cases against him before he was killed”
 
“They knew her routine – that she would put the paper to bed on Tuesday and on Wednesday, she would go to her farm. Yes, she did get threats but she has been getting threats since 2004, when she took up the Idgah Maidan case and opposed the withdrawal of Uma Bharti from the case (relating to violence in Hubli over the hoisting of the national flag in Idgah Maidan in 1994).
Adv Venkatesh added that conviction was also pretty common in a great many defamation cases and felt that it was inconsequential. “Anyone who tries to focus on the defamation cases as a possible motive for her killing must be joking. As a journalist, you should know that defamation cases are so common,” he said.

In fact, even Prof Kalburgi had something like 20 defamation cases against him and before he was killed, he had a conversation with Adv Venkatesh about how difficult it was to travel across the state to defend himself.

“Hindutva forces use every ploy, including the courts. They know that fighting multiple cases can be exhausting, with time taken away from other work to handle these cases. They have lawyers everywhere, at least five lawyers in every taluka who work for free. Whereas we don’t even have lawyers to fight our cases. They (right-wing forces) follow simple rules and have a one-point programme of hatred. But we are anarchic and have multiple discussions, we don’t have a common discourse and disagree on how to fight these forces,” he said.

Gauri Lankesh, who travelled across the length and breadth of Karnataka for her cases, turned the resultant harassment of court proceedings into an opportunity. “Every hearing used to be a chance for her to hold a meeting outside the court. She used it to the hilt, stating her views loud and clear. She wrote strongly and she spoke forcefully in English, in Kannada. Wherever there was communal violence against Muslims, against dalits or hatred being spread, she would go there.

Concurring with Venkatesh’s opinion, her friend and colleague Shiv Sundar told The Hoot that Gauri had at least 15 defamation cases going on.  This killing was part of the targeted violence that right-wing forces had unleashed all over Karnataka, especially in coastal Karnataka, he felt.
 

 
While Gauri Lankesh had been facing threats for her outspoken views for several years now, the immediate trigger for the killing was definitely the racheting up of an already communally vitiated atmosphere after the visit of BJP President Amit Shah in Karnataka last month, he felt. On Sept 5, the BJP persisted with holding a Mangaluru Chalo rally despite the state government’s refusal of permission to it.

Gauri Lankesh had been a strident critic of the bike rally, fearing an escalation in violence in the coastal areas of the state. As it is, the BJP is preparing for elections in Karnataka and the instances of communal violence had seen a marked increased over the last two years. Her newspaper had documented the killings.

Another possible trigger was that she spoke and wrote extensively on the Basavanna tradition of anti-casteism, rationality and secularism. She was critical when prominent members of the community had shifted allegiance to the BJP. She faced threats but she was impetuous and would not be cowed down, Shivsundar said, adding that close friends had asked her to be cautious and mute her views but that was simply not in her nature.

Asked if her work on the surrender and rehabilitation of Maoists and whether there was a ‘naxalite’ angle to the killing, as alleged by a prominent English language television channel, Adv Venkatesh felt that such conjectures only served to destabilize the investigation. We need to state this loud and clear: it is the work of hindutva terror units. Gauri knew this. She never spoke any other language,” he reiterated.
 
Hindutva terror in Karnataka
In 2015, after the killing of Prof Kalburgi, Gauri Lankesh spoke to this writer about the ‘hit list’ of those rationalists who were seen as a threat by hindutva forces. She said:
“We’ve made a list based on how many times the Hindutva groups spew venom on us and how strongly”, she says. First on the list is writer and rationalist K.S. Bhagwan, then writer Yogesh Master who has been attacked for his fictional work, and then another writer, Banjagere Jayaprakash.

Gauri Lankesh had then said that she was fourth on the list.

While Hndutva terror groups operate in every part of the country, they have managed to grow strong roots in Karnataka, especially coastal Karnataka. Gauri Lankesh travelled extensively in Mangalore,  infamous as Hindutva’s laboratory. The anti-communal front she had formed along with others, the Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedikehad grown into a major force, Venkatesh said, adding that Gauri Lankesh was an institution by herself. “Otherwise, they would not have targeted her.” She went on the offensive, was very vocal and could reach people. She spoke and wrote in Kannada and English and she had the legacy of her father, one of the finest journalists of Karnataka, he said. 

She received a lot of hate mail and had been threatened a number of times, said Adv Venkatesh, adding that the statement of Bengaluru’s police commissioner T Suneel Kumar was not entirely correct. She did not seek police protection, that was not her nature, Adv Venkatesh said. She firmly believed that she lived in a free country and that she had a Constitutional right to speak freely and a Constitutional guarantee that her life was precious and would be protected.

It is this confidence she had in a Constitutional pledge for all citizens of India that the State is today called upon to uphold.
 
Geeta Seshu is a independent journalist based in Mumbai and contributing editor of The Hoot. 

Courtesy: The Hoot

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I just deplaned after a 15 hour flight to see hundreds of messages of love and support for the work Gauri did and her shining ideals. She lived a beautiful life of purpose and fought the good fight. It will not be in vain. On the flight, I reflected on our growing up years and updated some of the recollections below because it is important to understand the wonderful milieu we grew up in. Thank you friends for the touching messages. Love and peace.

Gauri Lankesh: Amazing Grace

If Gauri Lankesh read all the tributes and accolades for her, particularly those that refer to soul and afterlife and heaven, she’d have cracked a good laugh. Maybe not a laugh, but at least a chuckle. We had decided in our teens that heaven and hell and afterlife were a lot of b.s. There was enough heaven and hell on earth, and we should just leave god alone – he has enough on his hands – instead of begging him for favors.

But part of our compact was we would not be hurtful to others – including family — even if we disagreed with their beliefs and practices. We didn’t always succeed – ah, the impetuosity of youth! — but it was a good principle that served us well later. Which is how even when we divorced 27 years ago, after five years of courtship and five years of marriage, we remained great friends. Part of the compact. Don’t be hurtful. Even to each other.

We met at a school that was the birthplace of the Rationalist Movement of India – National College. Our principal, Dr H.Narasimaiah, and the Sri Lankan rationalist, Dr Abraham Kovoor, were pioneers of the movement, and right from our teens we took to the thrill of questioning and debunking a variety of godmen/godwomen, charlatans, frauds, superstitions etc.

More on this another time, but I’m putting this out here early to provide some context to Gauri’s murder. Rationalists and agnostics are in the cross hairs of uber-religious bigots.

One of the first books we read together — before getting into the weeds (I mean metaphorically) of religion, politics, and life itself — was Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy. Neither of us was proficient in our mother tongue Kannada (at that time), so we regretfully forsook our own bounteous literature for everything from Wodehouse to Graham Greene, devouring anything that Premier Book Shop’s Mr Shanbhag could produce for us – at a matchless 20 per cent discount (others got 15 per cent). She returned to Kannada years later, but more on that soon.

Meanwhile, we “skinned our hearts and skinned our knees, learned of love the ABCs.” Terry Jack’s sappy, saccharine “Seasons in the Sun” had been released a few years earlier, and we hummed it between Dylan and Beatles. I’d return to Indian music years later; she was tone deaf. We read and laughed at Eric Segal’s Love Story, saw the movies Abba, Saturday Night Fever, and Gandhi on our first dates, and went to the boonies on moonless nights to see billions and billions of stars and galaxies after reading and watching Carl Sagan.

Feisty wouldn’t even begin to describe her. She hated the fact that I smoked in college. Years later, when I had given it up for a long time, she had begun to smoke. One time, she visited me in U.S (crazy innit? ex-wife visiting me? But we were better friends!) I insisted that she not smoke in the apartment because it was carpeted and the stink wouldn’t go away. It was winter.

“What do you want me to do?”
“If you have to smoke at all, go to the rooftop and smoke.”
“But it’s cold and snowing!”
“Shrug”
“You tightass!…I started to smoke because of you!”
“Awww…sorry old girl. I’m asking you to stop now.”
“Yeah, right. You’ve become too *&^%$#@ American!”
“American has nothing to do with it. Being healthy.”
“Bollocks. I’ll outlive you!”

Liar.

Many friends were bemused by our unbroken friendship. Separations and divorces are often messy, bitter, and spiteful in India, or anywhere for that matter. We had our volcanic moments, but we transcended that quickly, bound by higher ideals. On our day in court, as we stood next to each other, our hands reached out. Fingers interlaced. If you want to go your own ways, better disengage, the lawyer hissed.

After it was done and dusted (“by mutual consent”), we went out for lunch at the Taj down MG Road. The restaurant was called Southern Comfort. We laughed at the irony and said goodbye as I moved first to Delhi, them Mumbai, then Washington DC. She visited me in each place to argue about Life, the Universe, and Everything (we read Douglas Adams in school).

My parents loved her despite her rebellious nature, and remarkably for traditional, orthodox Indian parents, kept in touch with her – and she with them — even after we split. One time, when I told her about a budding dalliance, she drew herself to her full height (all of five feet and HALF INCH – she never failed to emphasize the half inch) and said: “Ha! You can never take away the honor of being the first daughter-in-law of the family.” When my mother passed away this past February, Gauri Lankesh was there, literally “live casting” for me the final rites as I flew home.

My ties with her family were as unusual. Through our separation and splitsville, I continued to meet her dad P.Lankesh, a writer, playwright, film-maker and an inspiration for a generation of rebel writers and journalists, and her sister Kavitha – “baby” to us-now a fine film-maker in her own right. Early in our college dalliance, after Lankesh’s due diligence determined that I passed the literary litmus test, I became part of the family – including the extended family of writers, poets, artists, teachers, and what I’d kid as the “buddhijeevi” (intellectual) crowd.

Starting early 80s, we met every Sunday evening for a game of cards, where the stakes were modest but the conversation was rich. Poetry, proverbs, epigrams, aphorisms, bon mots in English and Kannada flowed ebulliently at the table. If someone slowed down the game, someone else would intone “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…” Another person: “….creeps at this petty pace from day to day.” Third one: “…to the last syllable of recorded time!” It became bad form to speak in anything other than through literary allusions – in any language. A daring pick always invited “Vinashakaale Vipareetha Buddhi.”

They were brilliant, effervescent men, and Gauri (who joined us occasionally and was the only woman at the table) and I marinated in their learning. Appa, as I called Lankesh, taught Eng.lit in Bangalore University, but had decamped to Kannada when we met, having just directed his first movie (I think it was either Anuroopa or Pallavi, and it won the national award). Like many great Kannada writers (Bendre, Kuvempu etc) he started out wanting to write in English before finding his métier in his roots. His play “Sankranti’ was prescribed reading for undergrads, but we discussed everyone from Kalidasa to Ibsen, Chekhov, and Brecht.

All this continued through courtship, marriage, separation, and divorce, and even after I moved to U.S. Every time I went home, over a drink or two, pop-in-law and I, refereed by his daughter, would argue about politics, religion, literature, movies, U.S-India ties, farming distress, health, the world. Father and daughter would tease me about abandoning the good fight, while I’d insist that it was temporary, and a little time and distance is good for perspective. Lankesh had a low threshold for idiocy (there was a high turnover at the cards table in the initial years with those unable to handle his temperament scramming quickly) but his continued affection for me earned brownie points from Gauri. When he passed away in 2000, she truly became her father’s daughter, taking over the newspaper he founded and continuing the good fight.

To this day, I unfailingly drop into to the Sunday cards table (long after Lankesh passed away, Doc Gowda, the writer-physician, is the current torchbearer). At every other visit or so, as the years took their toll of the older generation, I’d see someone missing at the table. “Yelli Sharma? (Where’s Sharma?)” I’d ask, as they made place for me at the cards table, referring to the wonderful poet Ramachandra Sharma. “Oh! He’s gone up to join Lankesh at another table,” someone would respond, without batting an eyelid or breaking the game. “And Mysoremath is on his way to join them. He’s in hospital.”

I’m relating all this to give a sense of the intellectual atmosphere Gauri grew up in – practical, rational, and largely agnostic. Death was just incidental. Respect, affection, and admiration for the good people did and what they stood for was important. Her – our – favorite word and topic of conversation in recent years was “horaata” – a Kannada word roughly meaning a movement/agitation/revolution. “Haegide horaata?” I’d ask during our occasional phone calls. She’d launch into a litany of struggles she was in at the moment.

Gauri’s presence at the cards table became rare as she threw herself into the fight against right-wing bigots, zealots, and extremists. We argued about that too at the cards table because some friends thought she had gone the other extreme. There was no doubt she was left of center, even extreme left of center. But heart was in the right place, and there was no place in her world for violence. Only cowards took to violence.

Some eight years back, after I had built a new home in Bangalore in the fond hope that I’d return to India some day, she determined that I needed a housekeeper to manage the place. “I am sending someone over,” she declared over the phone. “She’s a widow with two young daughters. Make sure you take care of them and put them through school.” It was an order. I complied.

Ramakka, her gift to us, is still with us; her daughters Asha and Usha both finished from school, earned degrees, and now work – Asha in Syndicate Bank and Usha at an NGO. There are hundreds of Ashas and Ushas because of Gauri Lankesh.

Just a few weeks ago, when Mary, the kids and I were in India, Gauri called to announce she was coming over. She always came to see the kids, bearing gifts, none more precious than the love and warmth she brought with her. Days passed, and she did not turn up. Busy, busy, busy, she said…you know how hard it is handling the paper and fighting the chaddis (she called the right wing nutters “chaddis”).

One day, she called to announce that she’s coming with her son. “Who have you adopted now?” I asked. “Kanhaiya Kumar,” she chuckled. “You mean the JNU bloke?” “Yes, you’ll love meeting him.” Little later she called to say his flight was late and she can’t make it. That was the last time I heard her voice. Bubbly and bursting with energy and passion for causes big and small.

As my plane now wings towards India to a place without Gauri, my mind is a cauldron of fragmented memories. One phrase keeps repeating and resonating in my mind: Amazing Grace. Forget all other labels: leftist, radical, anti-Hindutva, secular etc. For me, there is just this: She is the epitome of Amazing Grace.
 

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