Remembering Slain Journalist Gauri Lankesh, Experts Flay School System: Classrooms Now 'Caste Rooms'
New Delhi: Meeting to remembering slain journalist Gauri Lankesh nine years after her killing by alleged Hindutva supporters, a number of academics, poets and social and political activists slammed the state of the education system across the country, especially in her home state of Karnataka.
Lankesh, a staunch critic of Hindutva nationalism, was murdered outside her own house in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017. At present, all the 17 men facing trial in her killing are out on bail. One of the accused was never traced.
The event on Saturday, September 5, organised by All India Students’ Association (AISA), was attended by sociologist Professor Lakshmipathi C.G., poet-activist Meena Kandasamy, JNUSU joint secretary and AISA leader Danish Ali, among others.
Professor Lakshmipathi C.G. said at the event that micro-level caste hierarchies within Indian families pepetutate "societal fascism", reports the Deccan Herald. While Karnataka has thousands of educational institutions with their own problems, those run by dominant-caste or religious-mathas are particularly ridden with the tendency to promote "rigid compliance" rather than "critical enquiry", he said.
Institutions are eroding instead of inculcating secular learning environments, making polarisation commonplace and turning once-vibrant academic spaces into "caste rooms" where prejudice rules and minority students are marginalised, he reportedly said.
Kandasamy highlighted the crisis created by the New Education Policy (NEP), in that it is perpetuating commercialisation, bypassing reservation mandates and forcing dropouts through rigid examination structures.
Assassinations in broad daylight and crackdowns against dissenters and critics are deliberate strategies to deter intellectual inquiry, she said, the publication reports. All of this is unfolding in a terrain where self-censorship is growingly the norm, Kandasamy pointed out.
Speaking at the event, Danish Ali said Lankesh was a fearless voice who paid the ultimate price for raising her voice against caste-based oppression. He referred to India’s recent ranking of 157th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index and related it to the suppression of student dissent, penalisation of protesters and militarisation of university campuses.
The trial into the killing of Lankesh by two motorcycle-borne assailants who fired at her and were captured in CCTV cameras, is still ongoing. The Wire reported in June that while a chargesheet against the 17 accused was filed in 2018, the trial only began in 2022, and that it is now being conducted by a seventh judge.
All the accused are out on bail since 2025. Two of the accused, Amit Baddi and Ganesh Miskin, were felicitated as "Hindu Tigers" in Hubbali in the state after they were granted bail, Maktoob media reported.
Baddi and Miskin are also accused of killing rationalist M.M. Kalburgi in Dharwad, Karnataka, two years earlier. The preliminary chargesheet in the case revealed that Lankesh was killed with the same gun used to assassinate Kalburgi on August 30, 2015.
In October 2024, two other suspects in Lankesh’s murder were felicitated in Vijayapura after being released on bail. Another accused, Shrikant Pangarkar, has won the Jalna Municipal Corporation elections in Maharashtra as an independent candidate in January 2026, Maktoob reports.
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