Nanu Gauri..#I am Gauri....The posters are plastered all over town, on every lamp post, on websites and news portals, with Gauri Lankesh’s trademark insouciance coming through in that engaging, human, oh so impudent grin. Protests and candle-light vigils are being held in the journalist’s name, with the next big one slated for this coming Tuesday, under the ‘Gauri Lankesh Hatya Virodhi Horata Vedike’ banner.
Who was this woman, whose brutal killing at the hands of a faceless bike borne assassin last Tuesday night turned her from a little known, left-leaning Naxal sympathizer and trenchant Narendra Modi and Hindutva critic to a storied cause celebre? Not just in Bengaluru, but across the nation where, within hours of her death, she became the face, the voice, the poster girl of the anti-Hindutva brigade.
Did the opposition BJP sense that a Gauri Lankesh in death could be a bigger threat to their battle for the hearts and minds of India, than when she was alive? Certainly, the alacrity with which one top BJP leader after the other rose to first condole her death much before anybody else had done so, and then push back at the many who drew a parallel between the killings of other left wing writers like Pansare and Dabholkar and Kalaburgi, even as one BJP leader, inappropriately said “if she hadnt attacked us, she would have still been alive,” cannot have been a coincidence.
Not that there was no Gauri-bashing on social media where she was mercilessly trashed and trolled by the likes of Nikhil Dadhich and Ankit somebody or the other, who called her inappropriate names and all but justified her death. Pro-left or pro-right, there’s no place for these growing legion of hate texters who have come to epitomise what our country has rapidly become - heartless, intolerant, unwilling to accept any criticism, any view that goes against theirs. The young people who populate that space, me thinks, the newest weapon in the hands of the old.
Sadly, the degree of hate this time, was not offset by the heartfelt praise from so many of her contemporaries, all of whom spoke of the shock at the manner of her passing – a bullet to her heart. The most moving tribute came from her ex-husband, who summed her up for what she was – the Dona Quixote of our times who couldn’t resist tilting at every windmill.
With her funeral seeing more people lining up to pay their last respects than any gathering one has seen in the city in recent times, one can only believe that Gauri Lankesh’s battle against those who preyed on the weak must have had some resonance. Where did all these people come from? Were they there, because they were horrified that a woman who lived and worked amongst us, was bumped off in the manner that she was? Was it a sign that the Left, which one thought was on the wane, had more sympathisers on the ground than we had all previously imagined? Or was it a reflection of the growing outrage across the country at the systematic silencing of anyone who stood up, stood out and revelled in their persona as the ultimate iconoclast.
Certainly, nobody looking at Gauri Lankesh’s eponymous Gauri Lankesh Patrika (GLP), a tabloid that she ran out of a tiny office in Gandhibazaar, with a print run that may have not crossed a few thousands, would have believed that she had such reach. In fact, that was the one thing that stood out that day when she was laid to rest – with more pomp and ceremony than she would have been comfortable with - the impact of Gauri Lankesh’s voice; clearly, far, far wider than anyone had given her credit for. Her killers, maybe, the only ones who knew...
What did she say and do that invited the wrath of these men, that angered them enough to kill her? And who were they, these men who tailed her, and stalked her in the last 48 hours of her life? Who ordered the kill? Who executed the kill order? Going through the last few issues of GLP one can see how she thought nothing of hitting way below the belt, using colourful terminology to describe the RSS and PM Modi, the main target of her bite, sarcasm and wit. The tabloid, which she renamed Gauri Lankesh Patrike after she inherited her iconic father P. Lankesh’s mantle and stepped into his overlarge shoes did become a vehicle for all the causes she espoused. For the men who wanted to silence her, it was a red rag to the bull.
But as her stunned sister Kavitha Lankesh told our reporters, they could have trolled her, shamed her, why kill her... Her brother, the film maker Indrajit, started off by pointing a finger at the critics among Gauri’s Naxal fraternity as being behind her killing. Although, why they would have an axe to grind with somebody like Gauri is a mystery. Even with the pitifully small resources she had at hand (her frends say she augmented her small income by publishing Kannada translations of anti-Hindutva books) she helped rehabilitate ageing Naxals who could no longer fight the good fight, in a cause that has seen little traction in this state. What could they possibly stand to gain by bumping her off?
Whether the killers came from the virulent Right or the Left is to be seen. Either way, its Siddaramaiah’s administration, which must rise to the challenge posed by his ‘good friend’s’ passing. Not only must the Chief Minister not take his eyes off the big prize – hunting down the killers - he simply cannot afford to allow Gauri Lankesh’s murder to hang fire, left unsolved for two years, as he has in the Kalburgi case. He is caught in a cleft stick, of course. The furore over whether the investigations should be handled by the state-run SIT or the central CBI is a no-brainer. The CBI will not go where the CM wants it to – blame it on the right.
But with the city’s incredibly slow moving police force reacting at snail’s pace to the news of her killing, he has an uphill task. Why, the police didnt immediately lock down the city and check all vehicles exiting on the Mysore highway, within minutes of the alert, is a mystery. In any other country, a clampdown would have been put in place, all roads blocked and the CCTV immediately scanned. But hey, in this IT city, it’s the citizens – not the government – that installs CCTV. And makes even that useless when it switches off the street-lights!
Gauri Lankesh would not have approved!
