Railing Against India's Right-Wing Nationalism Was a Calling. It Was Also a Death Sentence.

Railing Against India’s Right-Wing Nationalism Was a Calling. It Was Also a Death Sentence.

How the journalist Gauri Lankesh became a casualty of India’s increasingly intolerant politics.
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Gauri Lankesh usually worked late on Tuesday nights. The exuberantly leftist weekly newspaper she edited, Gauri Lankesh Patrike, went to press on Wednesdays, and she had to finalize the articles. But on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2017, she drove home early, around 7:45 p.m.; she had an evening appointment with cable repairmen to fix her TV. The last person she spoke to before leaving the office was Satish, the paper’s I.T. manager. Money was always tight because of her refusal to allow advertisements in the newspaper, which she felt was necessary to shield it from the corruption and outside pressure that often compromise the Indian press. Gauri Lankesh Patrike ran on subscriptions and newsstand sales, supplemented by a book-publishing sideline. But the paper’s financial situation had become so dire that she had decided, for the first time, to run ads in a forthcoming special holiday issue. She asked Satish (who goes by a single name) to start soliciting them the next day.

At its peak, Gauri Lankesh Patrike’s circulation numbered only in the high four digits, and Lankesh mostly wrote in Kannada, a regional language understood by only 3.6 percent of Indians (though in hyper-populous India, that is 48 million people, more than the total population of Spain). But her political activism and her lively social media presence extended her reach far beyond the paper’s print run. At a time of intense vitriol against the press in India, she was a fearless, sometimes reckless critic of the right-wing, Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which has held power in India since 2014. Her paper was a tabloid in every sense, gleefully sensational and indifferent to decorum. But the vehemence and humor of her polemics in defense of pluralism and minority rights had made her a beloved figure to an increasingly embattled opposition. She was more vulnerable than she sounded on the page. She reminded one friend of a sparrow: her head topped with a feathery whorl of short gray hair, bursting with noisy argument but fundamentally gentle. At 55 she was five feet and a half inch tall — she always insisted on the half inch, her ex-husband said — and skinny, possibly because of her heavy smoking and her tendency to work through mealtimes.

She lived alone in an unusually quiet pocket of Bangalore, the capital city of the south Indian state of Karnataka. Her lone concession to friends and family concerned about her safety was a few closed-circuit TV cameras she installed half a year earlier — cameras that captured some of what happened on the night of Sept. 5. Just after 8 p.m. she parked her car, a compact white Toyota, at an indifferent angle, then jumped out to open the gate. From the camera footage, it appeared that she hadn’t noticed the motorcycle with two riders that had followed her home. The moment she got her gate open, the motorcycle’s passenger rushed up and shot her with a crude pistol. Two bullets hit her in the abdomen, one passing through her liver.

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The situation has unquestionably deteriorated over the past several years — a fact that owes much to the ascent of the B.J.P. In the 2014 elections, the party won 282 of the 545 seats in the lower house of India’s Parliament, which determines the prime ministership. The Congress Party, which has led nearly every Indian government since independence, won only 44. Political pressure on journalists is nothing new in India, but the current government is the first in many years to treat them as an ideological enemy. Since he took office in 2014, Modi has not held a single news conference in India. Among B.J.P. politicians, a popular term for journalists is “presstitutes.” A dispatch on Indian journalism last year by the Committee to Protect Journalists described an unprecedented climate of self-censorship and fear, reporting, “The media is in the worst state India has ever seen.”

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