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‘I Am on the Hit List’: A deep dive into Gauri Lankesh's murder
Summary
A riveting work of reportage, Rollo Romig's book is a keen reminder of the changes in Indian society over the years
A journalistic investigation into the murder of Gauri Lankesh in September 2017 and the many questions that swirled around it, which doubles up as a frank but sensitive biography of the journalist and activist. A portrait of the city of Bengaluru, warts and all, painted as only someone who loves the city can. An improbable segue into the lore of St Thomas, the apostle believed to have travelled all the way to Kerala in the first century AD, as a way of exploring how personalities get mythologised. A second detour which dives into a more contemporary killing in Tamil Nadu, concluding with a reflection on moral licensing (the idea that the more good a person does, the more licence they give themselves to do bad) and murder. Through it all, a running thread of the apprehensions around the present and future of India among those who believe in democracy and secularism.
The very idea of having such a variety of themes between the covers of a single book sounds unwieldy. Yet, American journalist Rollo Romig brings these strands together with such dexterity that at no point does the narrative of I Am on the Hit List strike a discordant note. This may be Romig’s debut book, but he is a seasoned features writer, who has written multiple stories on south India.
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What drew me to I Am on the Hit List, in fact, was the memory of his excellent profile of P. Rajagopal, founder of the Saravana Bhavan chain of restaurants who was accused of murder, published in The New York Times Magazine over a decade ago. That piece finds a place in the book by way of an interlude, where Romig examines the parallels in the rationalisation of murders by the accused—both Lankesh’s and in the one ordered by Rajagopal.
The book’s opening chapter asks a question that many, including those closest to Lankesh, wrestled with in the days and weeks after she was shot down at her own doorstep on the night of 5 September 2017: “Why Gauri?"
Yes, she was an outspoken critic of Hindutva, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, both in the pages of the Kannada weekly Gauri Lankesh Patrike, which she edited, and beyond it. But the bald truth, as well-wishers like litterateur Girish Karnad highlighted, was that neither she nor her struggling publication were influential enough to merit the effort of an assassination.
As Romig wonders, “Who would want to shoot down this tiny, frail, fifty-five-year-old woman with a tiny, failing newspaper?" It is a question that recurs through the book. The author uses it to unpeel the different layers to Lankesh, the person and the professional, and probe the multiple theories which sprung up in the aftermath of her killing in the absence of a clear motive, including, finally, the motive uncovered by the Special Investigation Team (SIT), which arrested the accused.
Romig meticulously investigates each conjecture, including the right-wing angst over why Lankesh’s murder was getting so much attention unlike the killing of Hindutva activists in coastal Karnataka. Each theory also becomes a gateway to exploring contemporary Karnataka, its politics and culture, from the Lingayats seeking minority status, which roiled the state before the 2018 assembly elections, to the Naxal movement of the early 2000s. However, the scope of the narrative is not confined to Karnataka, with Lankesh’s murder being the last among four activists and writers shot down in a similar fashion in as many years.
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The “hit list" in the title refers to two lists: the first, an imaginary one drawn by progressives like Lankesh herself about who would be next after the murders of activists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, and scholar M.M. Kalburgi; the second, chillingly real and found by the SIT among the possessions of those arrested for Lankesh’s murder.
The book is also an appraisal of Lankesh, an honest and empathetic account that does not descend into hagiography as too many biographies tend to these days. I had heard of Gauri Lankesh before her killing, but I was more familiar with the names of her celebrity editor father, P. Lankesh, and filmmaker sister, Kavitha. And I was not the only one. In her life, Gauri Lankesh never reached the pinnacle of fame her father had, which is why the outpouring of grief and rage that swept the country in the wake of her murder took many aback.
In a telling anecdote, Lankesh’s close friend, the artist Pushpamala, decries how so many remembrances were far too reverential towards her “incorrigible friend", tending to “flatten a person into a martyr". Romig avoids this urge and presents Lankesh as someone who may not have been the most successful journalist but was a deeply passionate, kind, conscientious soul. It was hard not to admire her outspokenness against injustices, her talent for friendship, and, most of all, her unique ability to unite “disparate interest groups", reflected in the size of the crowds who mourned her.
Lankesh may be the pivot around which the book unfolds but, in this account, spread across a very readable 330-odd pages, one is introduced to a host of characters, not least among which is the city of Bengaluru, which Romig once considered making his home. For a reader who is a resident of the city, many of the references about it are hardly new. Yet, the writer’s craft make the passages engaging, such as a description of the traffic congestion which “calcifies as the day wanes" (though I would argue that it can be as impregnable in the dreaded morning rush hour).
The broader arc of the narrative, though, highlights the grim reality of an increasingly intolerant India. For Romig, who is married to a Malayali Muslim, the political is also personal as he speaks of his father-in-law who, for the first time, is considering emigrating, and the bigotry he senses when he mentions his wife’s name. He is thus able to bring to his work the lens of both an observant outsider and invested insider, if second-hand.
While discussing India today, a journalist friend recently brought up the familiar metaphor of the frog slowly being boiled in water who does not realise how bad things are till it is too late. Do we, for instance, still recall the 2020 arrests of schoolteachers and parents in Bidar in north Karnataka for staging a play critical of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)? Or the detention of the young activist Amulya Leona for raising the slogan of “Pakistan Zindabad" during an anti-CAA protest on grounds of sedition? Or the fact that even though the SIT found that the accused in Lankesh’s murder case acted in accordance with the principles of a work published by the Sanatan Sanstha, the organisation continues to thrive?
This list, too, is long. Besides being a riveting work of reportage, I Am on the Hit List serves as an important reminder of India’s democratic backsliding of the past few years for those who may, as Romig writes, have the luxury of tuning out.
Indulekha Aravind is an independent journalist.
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