Grand Tamasha: The life, death, legacy of journalist Gauri Lankesh
A new book by journalist Rollo Romig, I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, recounts the extraordinary life and the tragic death of Lankesh.
On September 5, 2017, journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot and killed outside of her house in Bangalore by armed assailants travelling on a motorbike. Lankesh, a journalist and social activist, was known for being a fierce critic of right-wing Hindutva politics and her murder has widely been seen as retribution for her outspoken views.
A new book by journalist Rollo Romig, I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, recounts the extraordinary life and the tragic death of Lankesh. Romig, a journalist, essayist, and critic, spoke more about his book on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Romig spoke with host Milan Vaishnav about his love affair with Bengaluru, Lankesh’s complex character, the shadowy right-wing organisation Sanatan Sanstha implicated in her killing, and the police investigation into her death. Plus, the two discussed Gauri Lankesh’s legacy and what her murder tells us about the state of contemporary India.
“Gauri wasn’t this national figure, but there was this incredible outpouring when she died. Partly, it was the shock of it. Partly, it was because it was her. What I found was…that she had connected with so many people all across her state,” explained Romig. “She had this talent for making connections that went far beyond what people who knew her realised. They only really understood it when tens of thousands of people came out on the street [after her death], all of whom felt close to her.”
Romig said people from every community in Karnataka one could imagine — Muslims, Christians, transgender people, student activists — took to the streets to honour her memory.
In the book, Romig recounts the adjectives used in the various remembrances of Lankesh. “Fun-loving; free-spirited; fair-minded; impatient; impulsive. affectionate; humane; exasperating; anxious about injustice; disputatious to a fault; quick to laughter; quick to anger; and quick to make friends.”
For Romig, Lankesh’s true talent was forging connections, friendships, and building community. “It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t come with a salary. It certainly didn’t for her. She was completely broke when she died. And it doesn’t often come with a lot of credit. It’s often dismissed as ‘women’s work’,” he said. “But it’s deeply political…and it had just an enormous impact on countless people. And you only really notice how far-reaching the work is when the person doing it is gone.”
Lankesh’s murder came on the heels of similar murders targeting so-called “rationalists”. This includes doctor and activist Narendra Dabholkar, lawyer and communist organiser Govind Pansare, and scholar MM Kalburgi. According to Romig, the prominence of the Lankesh case and the success of the investigation into her killing disrupted Sanatan Sanstha’s activities.
“I really don’t think that they expected Gauri’s case to be so notorious. Each of the three previous murders, each of those writers was locally well-known. But, none of them blew up to huge national attention, let alone international attention,” he noted. But Lankesh’s killing, in contrast, “became this international thing. There were stories in all the big newspapers all over the world after she was killed. It was a little more than they bargained for.”
