Teachers’ Day
On Tuesday, four of them shot dead Gauri Lankesh, editor of popular Kannada news weekly, Lankesh Patrike, at point blank range. Perhaps more brutal than her killing were some reactions to it. You could hear the satisfied hiss, feel the pointy fangs, the venom all frothy... “Jaise karni, waise bharni (sic),” tweeted one. Gauri’s karni: she took up cudgels against the Bajranj Dal for laying claim to the Sufi shrine of Baba Budangiri in Chikmagalur in the early 2000s. She founded a communal harmony forum, critiqued the Sangh, was part of a civil society group that tried to broker peace between the police and Naxals... Just imagine!
Vanish
A sub-committee of the Press Council of India visited 11 states and submitted a report in 2015. Since 1990, 80 journalists killed. Despite the tchi-tchis and tcha-tchas, only one conviction. Narendra Achyut Dabholkar was not a journalist. He was a doctor-rationalist from Maharashtra who disliked the caste system, criticised caste-related violence. Most of all, he hated how superstitions parading as religion crippled a section of Indian society. At the time of his death, he had been trying to push through in Assembly an anti-jadu tona bill, much to the dismay of the BJP and Shiv Sena. There was also that run-in with Asaram in March 2013. The godman’s Nagpur ashram was reportedly using drinking water to play Holi when the rest of the state was facing drought. That August, some people pumped four rounds of bullets into him from point blank range. Just to make sure. One never knows with jadu tona.
Deja Woe
Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalburgi were murdered in 2015. Pansare was from Maharashtra; a Communist who encouraged inter-caste marriages, discouraged superstitions, criticised glorification of Gandhi’s killer, wrote 21 books on social wrongs and a biography of the Maratha ruler Shivaji, whom he presented him as secular. Kalburgi was a scholar from Karnataka. A Lingayat himself, he had earned the ire of other Lingayats with his commentary on a patron saint. Then, his talk on the Anti-Superstition Bill angered Right-wingers. One morning in February 2015, they got Pansare. Close range. Kalburgi’s assailants invited themselves home. Repeat action.
PS: Days after Gauri’s death, reports suggest the killers in all four cases used the same make of pistol — 7.65mm. Right, that is the only thing they have in common.
Upala Sen