Where freedom is speech-less

It is a strange world where two men in a sleepy town can enter a study and shoot a scholar in his head and heart. With famed writer, researcher and former vice-chancellor of Hampi Kannada University, Dr M.M. Kalburgi being shot dead in his home in Dharwad by right wing extremists, the clocks have truly struck 13.

A Sahitya Academy favourite and one of the most heard voices of rational thought, Kalburgi’s death saw protests all over the country. Because in spite of all kinds of murders happening everywhere, for a man of letters to be killed for his thoughts opens the door to a path that leads to the most horrific of dystopias for the country. The similarity in the manner of deaths of Karnataka’s Kalburgi to that of Maharashtrian leftist politician Govind Pansare who wrote a bestselling biography of Shivaji and that of Maharashtrian anti-superstition activist and author Narendra Dabholkar has been noticed by all.

The furrows in the frowns of the likes of Girish Karnad (the security around whom has been amped up in a chain of dramatic reactions), writers K. Marulasiddappa, Gauri Lankesh and Bargur Ramachandrappa, as they protested the murder of a compatriot, can only deepen as they grapple with the new state of things where exercising intellectual freedom creates powerful enemies.

For the new generation of researchers who wish to continue to study on the foundations of religious thought and philosophy like Kalburgi and UR Ananthamurthy had, this stifling comes as a death knell. Twenty-four-year-old oral history research scholar Rudrani Gangopadhyay who is studying the Partition of India, is one who is distinctly uncomfortable with the air of fear that surrounds rational thought. “I was recently being asked by someone why I want to get out of the country, if it is academia I want to stay in, isn’t there a lot of good work being done here as well? And I actually told this person that this was in an interest of self-preservation. If I stay back, and allow myself to think and speak for myself, I would end up dead one day. Now, I am not implying that this doesn’t happen elsewhere, but in a country where motorcycle borne killers come in and shoot such respectable scholars as Kalburgi, what chance do I have to research, to write, to speak? Anything we say or write or type can and will be used to put an end to us if it doesn’t fit the state-approved mould. What original thought can even be allowed to breed here?”