Fearless journalist, editor and activist Gauri Lankesh was killed by unidentified assailants at the entrance of her home in Bengaluru West on Tuesday evening. She was 55. The assailants put 4 bullets in her including one in her temple, after she had stepped out of her car and opened the gates to her home which lay in darkness at around 8 pm. She died on the spot.
Gauri Lankesh once said that she wanted to be a doctor. When that didn’t happen, she took to journalism. She started her career in the English press, working with reputed publications like the Times of India, Sunday and India Today, before her foray into electronic media with Eenaadu TV.
Gauri’s tabloid – the Gauri Lankesh Patrike was vocal on secularism, the rights of Dalits, the downtrodden and women it was also a well-known critic of the Right-wing and Hindutva politics. And she kept her father’s firebrand nature alive in her writing. She minced no words while criticizing right wing and caste-based politics. She was also a columnist for various newspapers where she openly aired her anti-establishment views. In the 6 September. 2017, edition of her magazine, Lankesh had written against former Karnataka chief minister B S Yedyurappa.
When social media became the in-thing, she was all over it. Her Facebook wall and Twitter handles reflect her fearless and frank view on various political issues. She wasn’t embarrassed about becoming emotional about people or ideas that she cherished. Last year, after hearing Kanhaiya Kumar’s speech, she invited him to Bangalore. She wrote on social media, calling him her son.
Gauri Lankesh has been trolled and called names. There are those who belittled her, saying she was just basking in her father’s glory. She has been called a naxal sympathiser, anti-national, anti-Hindu and a host of other names. But none of this could faze her. Last year, Gauri was convicted in a defamation case filed by BJP MP Prahlad Joshi for a report against the party.
Sources said that two people had come to her home, and since, Gauri was under attack from people with ideological differences, the police suspect that her murder could be related to the defamation case she was embroiled in against Joshi.
Neighbors came out of a flat opposite the home where the journalist lived alone on what they thought were sounds of firecrackers and found Gauri lying in a pool of blood on her porch barely a meter away from the locked verandah to her home. “Normally, she works late hours because she is a journalist. Today she seemed to have returned home earlier than usual,’’ a neighbor said.
The assailants were either following Lankesh on her way back home from work or were waiting in the neighborhood for her arrival, police said. Some neighbors claimed to have seen two men moving up and down several times on a motorcycle on the quiet street in the Ideal Homes colony in Rajarajesh warinagar through the day.
A police inspector said. “The shots were fired from a very close range inside the compound of the house. She had been living alone in recent days after her elderly mother moved to her sister’s house,’’ said Shivasundar, a longtime journalist colleague of Gauri Lankesh.
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