Gauri Lankesh: Writer, Fighter, Speaker, Friend

Excerpted with permission from I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-Making in South India, authored by Rollo Romig, published by Context-Westland Books.

In the early years, the threats came by mail. A friend of Gauri’s remembers a pile of abusive postcards at the office, ‘filled with filthy sexual abuse and lewd bodily descriptions.’ Then came social media. ‘If you look at her Facebook, every day she was called a bitch, she sleeps with everybody, every expletive possible,’ her lawyer, B. T. Venkatesh, said. He encouraged her to file cases against the worst trolls, but she refused. She wouldn’t even block anyone on social media, and she never rejected a friend request: ‘She said no, it’s open space and debate.’

She knew what she believed in, but she loved a good debate. She happily published letters from young activists critiquing her columns; often those letter-writers became regular contributors. Once, the writer Samvartha Sahil recalled, she asked him urgently to translate into Kannada a poem by Hussain Haidry that had gone viral online, which ends with these lines:

I’m Hindustani Musalmaan.
The Hindu temple door is mine,
as are the Mosque minarets mine,
the Sikh Gurudwara hall is mine,
The pews in churches also mine;
I am fourteen in one hundred,
But in these fourteen not othered,
I am within all of hundred,
and hundred is the sum of me. 

Don’t view me any differently,
I have a hundred ways to be
My hundred nuanced characters,
from hundreds of storytellers.
Brother, as Muslim as I am, 

I’m that much also Indian.

And in her next issue, she published the poem alongside a scathing response by the poet Abul Kalam Azad, which ends like this:

I am the tenant
Every owner evicts

I am the refugee
Every border rejects  

I am not your Hindustani Musalman,
For it’s a door I am forced to knock,
The one that is never opened  

I am not your Hindustani Musalman,
For I am killed
For not being one

‘Gauri always had space for dissent,’ Sahil wrote.

Like her father, she wouldn’t hesitate to attack her friends in print if she thought they had it coming. For a time her close friend Vivek Shanbhag published a well-regarded literary journal called Desha Kaala. On the journal’s fifth anniversary, he brought out a special anniversary issue—and Gauri marked the occasion by publishing a denunciation of Desha Kaala as elitist and casteist. She was eager for Shanbhag to write a response that she could publish, but he demurred. A debate over Desha Kaala, both pro and con, raged in the pages of Gauri Lankesh Patrike for several issues nonetheless. ‘It caused little awkward situations between us,’ he told me. ‘But both of us put it behind us quickly. There was no tension in our friendship. See, it is a healthy sign that writers fight things out like this. I don’t agree with what they wrote. But it’s okay. There’s a different view. And it’s fine!’

Some of her old friends grew tired of all the debating. Srinivasaraju, who’d shown her how to use Twitter, refused to follow her. Rajghatta had for years ignored her Facebook friend request, not wanting his timeline to be hijacked by political arguments with his ex- wife. He finally accepted it, four months before she died, because she so keenly wanted to see all the latest photos of Rajghatta’s son. ‘But please!’ he messaged her. ‘NO SNIDE/ NASTY comments and no political scraps!’

She often stayed up until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning posting to Facebook and Twitter, sharing links and sparring with trolls, never seeming to care how personal or threatening they got. She’d invite them to continue the discussion in the real world, over a cup of coffee; they never took her up on it. One friend theorised that she believed so deeply in dialogue because her own life had taught her how much a person can change. But how to reconcile her evident yearning for connection and dialogue and her impulse to mock her opponents, her willingness to offend? Perhaps she expected her gibes to roll off her targets the same way their attacks rolled off her. She didn’t hold grudges, so she underestimated the grudges of others. And what was her murder but a bloody grudge?

When she left the office alone late at night and her colleagues expressed concern for her safety, she’d say, ‘Am I so pretty that someone would rape me?’ Like her father, she often treated political argument like sport. ‘She loved it,’ Kavitha told me. ‘She loved fighting, she loved voicing her views, she took great pleasure in standing up for people.’

And yet she was sharply attuned to her vulnerability. Late at night, at home or at a friend’s house, she’d sit facing the street, aware whenever someone walked by outside. Chandan Gowda remembers once sitting and talking with her late in his front room when she said, ‘There’s someone watching me out there.’ He leaped up and closed the curtains. And she was deeply worried about threats to her friends. ‘I will not be able to bear it if anything happens to any of you,’ she texted the activist Umar Khalid a month before she died.

She was threatened enough to qualify for state-ordered police protection— an armed security detail that would shadow her wherever she went. Her lawyer urged her ‘umpteen times’ to accept it. Gauri brushed him off. ‘I’m a journalist,’ she told him. ‘I fiercely value my privacy and freedom. If you had two gun-toting constables with you at all times, how are you going to meet people?’ She also didn’t like that police protection would indebt her to the government.

Also read: Remembering Gauri Lankesh: A Hope, a Possibility, a Lesson 

Instead of meeting her for coffee, her critics filed criminal defamation cases against her. In the United States, defamation is nearly always handled as a civil offence, litigated by lawsuit. In India, defamation is a criminal offence that’s easy to pursue and can result in prison, thanks to British colonial laws that are still on the books. These laws are widely abused by the most powerful politicians and companies to silence, bankrupt, and imprison their critics. Such charges rarely hold up in court, but they are effective in harassing journalists because the accused must show up in court wherever the charge is filed or face arrest. The cases are such a hassle to defend that many publications just go ahead and run a correction on the disputed article even if there was nothing factually wrong with it— and thereafter avoid criticising litigation-happy subjects. The laws therefore act as a powerful inhibition on the press, even when they aren’t invoked.

‘In India, if the story cannot be killed, the storyteller is silenced,’ said B. T. Venkatesh, who handled most of Gauri’s defamation cases. An energetic man with a wry smile and a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard, his full name is Bubberjung Trisuli Venkatesh, and the unusual surname, Bubberjung, derives from a Persian term meaning ‘the man who fought like a lion’— a title that one of his ancestors earned while fighting for Hyder Ali against the British. Venkatesh’s own fights centre on free expression and the rights of the marginalised. ‘Proud Attorney for Prostitutes, Hijras, Kothis, spectrum of LGBTiQ and Garment Workers,’ his Twitter bio reads. He defended Gauri in more than seventy cases over the course of her editorship.

Venkatesh’s laughing response when I asked him if I could record our interview was typical. ‘I don’t care a damn!’ he said. ‘I don’t care about anything—I don’t mince words. Nonsense is nonsense everywhere, is it not?’

Still, he would advise Gauri to be more careful with her words. ‘She’d say, ‘I am going to call a scoundrel a scoundrel! It’s your job to defend me,’ he said. He asked her to at least do some fact-checking of her articles. ‘She said, where is the time for all that nonsense, Venkat?’ he said, laughing. ‘She was notorious for that. And sometimes she would tell me, I have done it! And I was absolutely sure she had not.’

Gauri’s opponents—RSS activists, politicians, mobsters—would file charges against her all over the state in order to consume her time and resources. She transformed the hassles into opportunities. Lawyers who supported her causes, including Venkatesh, defended her pro bono wherever she went (although one of Venkatesh’s colleagues complained that it was difficult to travel in Gauri’s car because the stench of cigarettes was so strong). She used her forced excursions as a chance to make connections in every corner of Karnataka. When she had to appear in court in some distant town, she’d often schedule a political meeting there. ‘All these guys did in harassing her actually helped her,’ Venkatesh said. ‘Her sphere of influence increased multifold.’

To get her out of appearing in court too often, Venkatesh would often tell the judge that she was too ill to appear on the scheduled day. Sometimes a judge would challenge him: on the day you said she was ill, the newspapers reported that she delivered a fiery speech. ‘Yes, sir,’ Venkatesh would reply, ‘after making that particular speech she fell ill. Only on the day when she was supposed to appear before the court was she not well.’ (‘We are lawyers!’ he said with a laugh.)

On November 27, 2016, she was finally convicted in two criminal defamation cases in response to a story she’d published almost nine years earlier claiming that several BJP leaders had defrauded a jeweller. It was a story that many local papers had run, but only Gauri had named the alleged culprits in print. She was fined 10,000 rupees and sentenced to six months in jail; when she died, she was out on bail while awaiting appeal. Kavitha told me that sixteen other defamation cases were still pending against her.

I asked Venkatesh if Gauri’s rhetoric went overboard at times. ‘Frequently, not at times!’ he said. ‘Whenever you put her on a stage to speak, you don’t know what’s going to get into her. She said Hinduism is not a religion at all. Her speech was sometimes very intemperate.’ In one example that particularly offended her opponents, in response to a campaign to mail sanitary napkins to Modi to protest a new tax on menstrual hygiene products, she suggested on Twitter that they mail napkins that had already been used. ‘She used such language that it was shocking,’ he said. ‘We have a very, very conservative society. Women speaking is itself unacceptable; a woman speaking in such language is impossible.’

Friends, too, sometimes complained to her about her language and urged her to tone it down. ‘If I don’t use harsh words, they might mistake my critique for a lullaby,’ she replied when one activist questioned her about her rhetoric. ‘She may have argued with a shrill voice, because the present position forces you to raise your voice,’ Professor Sreedhara told me. ‘You can’t whisper. She raised her voice louder than others because there were no other loud voices, so it sounded loud.’

While Gauri’s language could be sardonic and mocking, it was never anywhere near as harsh as that of the countless people who revelled in her death. She never threatened or even expressed a desire for violence against those she mocked; when an opponent died, she never said ‘good riddance.’ And she never saw even her arch-enemy as less than human. She didn’t like it when people made fun of Modi for his imperfect English. To do so, she thought, was just to repeat the linguistic discrimination of the British colonisers.

She wrote an editorial essay for the paper every week for over seventeen years, totalling more than eight hundred and fifty. In many she ‘raged against the world,’ as the historian Janaki Nair put it, ‘a world of injustice, inequality, squalor, discrimination, violence, plunder, and greed.’ Her rage was most often directed at the rising right wing in all its avatars: the Sangh Parivar, the RSS, the BJP, and their leaders both locally and nationally. But denunciation wasn’t her only mode, a point that her friend Chandan Gowda was careful to demonstrate in the first English-language anthology of her work, titled The Way I See It, which he edited with impressive subtlety and published less than two months after her death. Many columns highlighted local problems that were ignored in the mainstream press, especially among manual labourers. Some columns told the stories of activists in other countries whose work she admired. Some were book or film reviews; some were biographical sketches; some were personal essays. Two running themes of her columns, Gowda noted, were their direct address to her readers and their appeals to a shared humanity. ‘After narrating a story of compassion or of brutality, they ended by asking if the reader’s heart wasn’t stirred or didn’t burst with rage,’ he wrote in the book’s introduction.

When writing against politicians or religious nationalists, Gauri was strident and jeering; when writing in praise of her comrades, she was sincere and affectionate; when writing in defence of the oppressed, she was anxious and tender. When writing about herself, she was invariably self-deprecating. Regardless of subject, she was direct and frank and unpretentious, and never lyrical or abstract. There was little evidence of craft. She knew she was no poet. ‘No one thought that her Kannada columns would someday be translated and published as important documents as they are being done today,’ her friend Pushpamala noted.

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At a time when the mainstream press increasingly shied away from aggressive investigation, Gauri’s paper became more insistent than ever in attacking the powerful, the moneyed, the corrupt, and the revered. But to what end? The paper’s readership had plunged. Its presence on the web was non-existent. But although the circulation of her paper was a tiny fraction of her father’s at its peak, it would be a mistake to understate its importance to certain of its readers—particularly those whose problems were roundly ignored by every other publication. Small local papers like Gauri’s play a crucial role in maintaining India’s extraordinary regional diversity, in direct opposition to the homogenising mission of the Hindutva right wing. Even if her reach and influence were limited, she gave marginalised people an important jolt of confidence just by listening to their views and putting them in print.

The best quality of Gauri’s writing was the sense that she was writing to you, the reader, directly, as someone who gets it. You got the feeling that she could have been your friend—and she probably would have. At the end of her life, her circle of friends was still expanding. She liked to ‘adopt’ fellow activists whom she admired: the transgender activist and memoirist A. Revathi appeared in Gauri’s columns as ‘my sister Revathi,’ and more recently she had a penchant for referring to the new generation of young left activists across India—Kanhaiya Kumar, Jignesh Mevani, Umar Khalid, Shehla Rashid—as her sons and daughters. She doted on young activists, buying them clothes, feeding them, and talking them through their romantic troubles or their mental health struggles. At political meetings she’d be surrounded by young people calling her ‘Amma.’

Also read: What Girish Karnad Told Gauri Lankesh As the Saffron Army Laid Siege to Bababudangiri

More than in her paper or on social media, her words spread through the public speeches she gave in her activist work, which often made it onto YouTube. ‘Sometimes in public meetings I would feel very embarrassed. I never understood why she stood up to speak,’ Srinivasaraju said. ‘One day at some protest I told her, Gauri, couldn’t you keep your mouth shut? She said, “You are always trying to weigh options, but somebody has to speak.”’

Despite the notoriety it had brought her, she continued her defence of the Naxalite cause while condemning their violence. Eventually her at tempts to mediate between Naxalites and the government resumed. She and her colleagues reassembled the Citizens’ Initiative for Peace. ‘Gauri must have met government officials a hundred times,’ Sreedhara said. ‘She did all the running around.’ Finally, beginning in 2014, they persuaded the police and state government to allow nine former Naxalites who’d forsworn violence to come aboveground. The government’s initial negotiating position was that the former Naxalites should formally surrender, publicly apologise, forswear activism, enter a government rehabilitation camp, and inform on their comrades who remained underground. The former Naxalites insisted that the government drop all these conditions. Remarkably, the government eventually agreed to, thanks in large part to Gauri’s persuasive role in the negotiations. The ex-Naxalites still must stand trial for any charges against them, but the government won’t block them from getting bail. ‘Without her we cannot imagine our new life and new struggle,’ Noor Zulfikar, one of the nine, told me.

In Gauri’s martyrdom, her talents were misidentified. Because her job title was journalist—and because journalists in India, and elsewhere, are genuinely under threat—it was assumed that journalism was what she was targeted for, and that journalism was what she was great at. But after talking with so many people who knew her and worked with her and loved her and hearing all the many complicated ways they thought about her, I came to see it differently. Her great talents were those that don’t come with job titles: a talent for friendship, a talent for outrage, a talent for mentorship, a talent for cultivating ‘local thoughts,’ as one friend put it, in the face of a growing movement to homogenise Indian culture. The extraordinary variety of people who came out to protest her murder revealed another underappreciated talent: the ability to align in common cause disparate interest groups that otherwise agitated on separate tracks. ‘We actually didn’t realise the space she filled,’ one activist told me. ‘Now we can see that no one is ready to fill that space.’

Rollo Romig is an independent journalist.