DABHOLKAR, PANSARE, KALBURGI, GAURI—who would be the next person to get a visit from two men on a motorcycle with a 7.65 mm pistol? After Kalburgi’s murder, scores of Indian writers returned their awards from the National Academy of Letters to protest both the lack of progress in the murder investigations and the BJP’s seeming indifference to a climate of rising intolerance in India. And Indian progressives started talking about the List: an imagined ranking of who was most likely to die next.
Gauri had her own version of the List. ‘We’ve made a list based on how many times the Hindutva groups spew venom on us and how strongly,’ she told The Hoot, an organisation that monitors Indian media, in a September 2015 interview, a month after Kalburgi’s murder. First on the List, in her estimation, was K. S. Bhagawan, a rationalist academic from the city of Mysore, known for his translations of Shakespeare to Kannada, and also for his bold—some would say reckless— rhetoric against religion. (Some right-wing activists agreed; immediately after Kalburgi’s murder, one Hindutva leader in the coastal city of Mangalore tweeted, ‘Mock Hinduism and die a dog’s death. And dear KS Bhagawan you are next.’)
Second on the List, Gauri thought, was the Kannada writer Yogesh Master. In 2013, Master was arrested after Hindutva activists complained that his novel Dhundi insulted the god Ganesh. One court released Master, but another banned the book. In March 2017—six months before Gauri’s murder—she invited Master to attend a public programme in honour of her father, P. Lankesh. Afterwards, a dozen right-wing activists on motorbikes attacked Master at a tea stall, smearing black oil all over his face in an attempt to humiliate him, and threatened to kill him for defaming Hindu gods. Gauri immediately led a protest march to the nearest police station and registered a complaint. ‘Apart from arresting the perpetrators of the crime, the conspiracy behind the attack should also be uncovered,’ she said. Master said that he could easily identify most of the attackers. No arrests were made.
Third on Gauri’s version of the List was the Kannada writer Banjagere Jayaprakash, who had offended some Lingayats in 2007 when he claimed that Basavanna was actually a Dalit, and had offended some Hindus in 2016 when he claimed that the nineteenth-century mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa ate beef and smoked cigarettes.
Fourth on the List, Gauri thought, was Gauri herself. ‘She would joke about it with her friends, saying, “I am on the hit list,” and things like that,’ Kavitha told me. ‘But we never thought she could be in such a kind of threat.’
None of Gauri’s friends thought she was first on the List. ‘I would not have put her on the List at all,’ the journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju told me. ‘I never, ever imagined that she would be a target. There were a lot of other big voices. I mean, as editors, we get all those threats, right? If I do a story, I get some ten or fifteen phone calls where they say, “We know what to do with you,” and all that. That’s a routine part of the profession, so you take it, you leave it, and ignore it. You can’t publish anything if you start getting worried about it.’
Her colleague Shivasundar said that Gauri was always much more worried about the safety of other writers and activists than her own. When Modi was elected in 2014, he said, Gauri’s first dismayed reaction was ‘What will happen to Teesta?’—referring to Teesta Setalvad, an activist who had filed court cases against Modi in his home state of Gujarat. ‘Gauri always had a habit of skipping the queue,’ Shivasundar told me. ‘For example, after a meeting, there will be a line to have food. She would skip the queue and get the food. In that way I think even here she has skipped the queue.’
Shortly after Gauri’s murder, an official version of the List appeared: guided by input from the state police’s Intelligence Department, the Karnataka government offered armed protection to at least sixteen writers and activists. And new names appeared on the List, as friends of Gauri’s found themselves becoming newly outspoken. Chief among them was Prakash Raj, a multilingual movie star and close friend to Gauri’s family. He seemed unable to contain himself, casting blame on BJP leaders and naming names. ‘His wife is petrified,’ Kavitha told me. ‘They have a small three-year-old child. I messaged him yesterday: try not to say the names. It shouldn’t be a direct hit. Because that’s when you get targeted.’
For many in Karnataka, the chill on speech deepened. A young investigative reporter told me that, before Gauri was murdered, the example she set by her fearlessness emboldened other female journalists. ‘Gauri’s murder shook me,’ she said.
Several of Gauri’s friends told me that their families were pleading with them to stay quiet about politics. ‘People are falling in line,’ Chandan Gowda told me. Some were disgusted by this climate of caution. But the fear wasn’t so easy to shake off. ‘The murder is the message,’ the journalist P. Sainath wrote. ‘The use of the same modus operandi is part of that message: “Yes, it’s us. We did it again. And will, yet again. Let this be a warning to all of you.” The message also says: “We’re casting a wider net.”’
But who was sending this message? And what did it mean beyond these terrifying yet vague warnings? I asked Gauri’s friend Shivasundar if he thought the same assassins were behind the murders of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, and Gauri. ‘Our conviction is that the brain is the same. The hand may be different,’ he said. ‘What we are bothered about is, who is the fifth? To avoid the fifth, you should prosecute the brains, not the hands.’ But no one, brains or hands, had been prosecuted for any of the killings. No one claimed credit; no one confessed.
This is an excerpt from Rollo Romig's 'I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-making in South India', published by Westland Books. You can purchase the book here.