Nearly Nine Years After Gauri Lankesh's Murder, Trial Moves to Seventh Judge
New Delhi: A trial against 17 individuals from right-wing Hindutva groups who were accused for the murder of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh, has now moved into the hands of the 7th judge. The chargesheet against the 17 accused was filed in 2018, while the trial began in 2022.
On Tuesday (June 10), K.S. Bharath Kumar started conducting the trial after the previous judge, M, Chandrashekar Reddy, was transferred to a senior administrative role in the Karnataka high court, The Indian Express reported.
Kumar took charge of the principal district and sessions court in Bengaluru on June 1. He began by recording the statement of a police constable, who is the 216th of 400 prosecution witnesses in the case.
The trial started on July 4, 2022, and has been conducted daily since. Express reported that all other previous judges who conducted trials in the case – S. Amarannavar, Anil Katti, C.M. Joshi, Ramakrishna Huddar and B. Muralidhar Pai – were elevated to the high court.
Gauri Lankesh, 55, was the editor of the weekly Lankesh Patrike magazine. An outspoken critic of Hindutva, she was shot dead at her residence in Bengaluru late on September 5, 2017, by two motorcycle-borne assassins identified as Parashuram Waghmore, 26, a former member of the Sri Rama Sena in Bijapur, and Ganesh Miskin, 27, a Hindutva activist from Hubbali.
According to the SIT, her murder was planned by extremist right-wing groups, under the banner of Sanatan Sanstha, who had created a syndicate to carry out killings and attacks on Hindutva’s critics, between 2013 and 2018. Their ‘hit-list’ also included the name of The Wire‘s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan.
The preliminary chargesheet had also said that Lankesh was killed with the same gun used to assassinate Kalburgi in Dharwad in Karnataka on August 30, 2015.
In May 2025, one of the witnesses from Belagavi, who had earlier provided a court statement about attending training camps attended by outside experts, had turned hostile and denied his earlier statements, the daily reported.
A prosecution witness from Udupi in Karnataka, who was identified among the people recruited by the right-wing Hindutva syndicate, also denied attending meetings and a training camp of the group.
Another prosecution witness linked to the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and alleged to have loaned his motorcycle to an accused for a recce of the journalist’s home, had also reportedly turned hostile.
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