Rollo Romig: “Gauri Lankesh had a talent for connecting people”

The author of ‘I Am on the Hit List’ on the journalist-activist’s assassination, and what it says about the criminalisation of dissent

How did you come to write this book on the assassination of Gauri Lankesh?

Author Rollo Romig (Eva Garmendia)

I’ve been coming to India to report for the New York Times Magazine for over a decade with a focus on south India. I’d increasingly been spending time in Bangalore with my family. We’d just spent a month there and left when I got the news that Gauri Lankesh had been assassinated.

I’d never met Gauri. I’d heard of her, and I knew many people who knew her, but it came as an enormous shock that she was murdered as it did for so many people in Bangalore, partly because it just didn’t seem like such a thing was possible there. Bangalore has extremely low rates of gun crime. I had one police officer tell me that sometimes a full year goes by without a gun being discharged, let alone shooting someone. So, the fact of this middle-aged woman, alone, coming home after a day’s work, getting shot dead on her doorstep, just came as a huge shock. It felt like a bad omen about the direction of political violence in the country.

I was interested in trying to figure out the mystery of who had shot Gauri Lankesh and why, and using that as an opportunity to examine a rapidly changing country. I first wrote about her assassination for the New York Times Magazine, but though it was a long article I felt like I was just scratching the surface and there was much more that needed to be explored, not just about the investigation but about Gauri herself and her life. I quickly realized I’d like to write a book about this. That’s how it started.

How did your personal connection with India (being married to a south Indian) deepen your understanding of the events surrounding Lankesh’s murder?

My wife is from Kerala, born and raised there. It would have been a much worse book if I hadn’t had my wife’s input and wisdom. I come at reporting in India from a big disadvantage. I don’t speak any Indian languages except for English. I’m an outsider. In some ways I think being an outsider can be a slight advantage, that you come to things with a bit of a fresh eye and a fresh perspective, but for the most part it means that I have to catch up a lot. I always need plenty of help in getting it right. My wife is also a writer and she always reads my work and saves me from mistakes. There are many other Indian writers and journalists who’ve helped me along the way, either in reading my drafts or in just giving me information generously, spending their time, resources and connections.

We’re used to thinking of books as having a singular author, and that hasn’t been my experience at all. My name is the only name that appears on the cover, but I see the process as being deeply collaborative. Dozens of people helped me with this book.

You write that the “full scope of Gauri Lankesh’s life seemed to have eluded even those who knew her best.” Why was she such an enigmatic figure?

I spoke to so many people who knew Gauri throughout her life, and people who knew her when she was younger and people who knew her when she was older often seem to be describing a different person. People who knew her when she was younger often described her as a party girl. She loved to have fun — she loved to have fun until the end of her life, but there was a shift where she became much more politically radicalized. Over the years, she shifted her description of herself professionally from journalist to journalist-activist to activist-journalist and finally she thought of herself as an activist first, although she was always doing journalism. That was a big shift. She always was passionate about justice, but it wasn’t until after she took over her father’s newspaper, Lankesh Patrike, that she started to think of herself as an activist, and as someone with a political agenda that she wanted to forward.

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When she was younger, she was famous for her house parties. Later in life, some of her friends even described her as almost ascetic. She was a workaholic. She never ate enough. She just devoted every hour in the day and lost sleep over running her newspaper and her activist causes. I was really interested in that shift, and I was just interested in her as a person. This is a book that’s about a murder investigation, but to me what was really the most interesting and the most powerful thing, was getting to know this other human being who unfortunately I had never met — learning from Gauri’s example about how to live a life. She had this extraordinary talent for connecting people. That really flourished as the years went on. And even as her paper diminished in circulation — and at the time she was murdered, it was really struggling; there was doubt if it would even survive for long — she had quietly at the same time built up this enormous network of people she was connected to in her activist work and just in her life.

After she was murdered, there was this understandable reflex to assume that she was an enormously successful journalist. It’s not that she was unsuccessful, but like I said, her paper was really struggling at the end of her life. And even some of the people closest to her acknowledge that she wasn’t necessarily the most polished writer on the scene. But her real talents were these talents for friendship, these talents for connecting people, these talents really for building community. It’s enormously important work that people only notice when the person doing it disappears. And that’s what happened in Gauri’s case.

There really wasn’t anyone to take that place, and you could see that in this incredible outpouring that happened in Bangalore after she was killed, where tens of thousands of people from every imaginable community came out mourning her because she’d connected with so many people from so many different communities. I found that remarkable, and it really changed the way I think about my own life and what my priorities are and should be.

As an outsider what were some of the challenges you faced while researching the book?

I don’t speak Kannada, so I was highly reliant on translators, and in fact both of Gauri’s parents wrote memoirs that had never been translated out of Kannada. I actually commissioned a translator to translate both of those books in full and to this day I think I’m the only person who’s read the English translations that I commissioned. But I couldn’t let that go. I couldn’t write a book about Gauri Lankesh without reading her parents’ memoirs. They are fascinating books, and I hope that the English translations do get published.

In the case of the police Special Investigation Team investigating Gauri’s murder, because I was coming from outside, I think it took longer to get access to them. I think it speaks to how careful their investigation was in general, how meticulous, how principled it was. It was actually a couple of years into my own investigation that they started talking to me. They wanted to wait until they felt like they’d really cracked the case. Once they did, they were very generous with their time.

What do you think will be the most enduring legacy of Gauri Lankesh?

Several of Gauri’s friends told me that they never imagined while Gauri was alive that her work would be anthologized in books as it has been. The writer, translator, and scholar Chandan Gowda quickly came out with an excellent anthology of Gauri’s writing shortly after she was murdered. I highly recommend the book for anyone who’s interested in Gauri and her life. But yeah, her work has taken on a surprising life since she died.

One notable example was at the height of the protest movement against the citizenship laws. About five years ago I started seeing a quote from Gauri circulate: “I will do what I can and I will say what I should. These intolerant voices find strength in our silence. Let them learn to argue using words instead of threats.” I think that suggests the sort of legacy that will live on for her in what she stood for.

What is the current status of the investigation into the murder of Gauri Lankesh?

The investigation seems to have gone quite well. The Special Investigation Team corralled an enormous wealth of evidence against the men who they eventually charged with a charge sheet of over 9,000 pages. And they ultimately charged 18 men, 17 of whom they arrested, one of whom is still absconding, and it still took a couple of years for the trial to begin. Most of those arrests happened in 2018. The trial in her murder case didn’t begin until the summer of 2021. It’s now three-and-a-half years after the trial began and the end is still not near. In some ways it seems like the case is falling apart. All 17 of the men who were arrested for conspiring to murder Gauri have been released on bail. It’s never a good sign for the prospects of a murder trial when the suspects are released on bail. But some people close to Gauri, including her long time lawyer BT Venkatesh, continue to seem optimistic. I’ll defer to them and also hope for the best.

Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist based in Kashmir.