(Excerpted with permission ‘I Am on the Hitlist: Murder and Myth-Making in South India’ by Rollo Romig, Westland Books)
The inescapable fact of Bangalore is its traffic. Its once sleepy streets are now choked, a congestion that calcifies as the day wanes. Stuttering yellow autorickshaws, all of them occupied. Infinite white Ubers, none of them the one you’re waiting for. Dripping water tankers. Overloaded two-wheelers. Sometimes, like an apparition from the lost past, the rare bullock cart, trapped in exhaust fumes from the thousand idling engines surrounding it. Old-timers will reminisce about how legendarily navigable Bangalore’s streets once were; new tra✨nsplants will grouse that the traffic is the only major blemish fouling Bangalore’s reputation as India’s most liveable city. Like the rent in New York and the rain in London, the topic of traffic dominates Bangalore small talk, clogging the spaces between worthier subjects just as the traffic itself clogs the spaces between where you are and where you want to be.
Some find ways to adapt to it. The Bangalore-based fiction writer Vasudhendra dedicated one of his books to the city’s traffic, because he wrote his stories during traffic jams on his commutꩵe to his tech job (which his books’ success allowed him to quit). No one can evade it. Even Gauri Lankesh, who made a career of mocking tradition, of scoffing at convention, of impishly living as she wished, spent the last thirty minutes of her life in the most ordinary Bangalore way: in traffic.
She described herself as an ‘activist- journalist,’ and she worked as the editor of a weekly newspaper that bore her name: Gauri Lankesh Patrike, the word ‘patrike’ meaning simply ‘newspaper’ in Kannada, the primary mother tongue of the state of Karnataka, whose capital is Bangalore. Gauri Lankesh Patrike went to press on Wednesdays, and on Tuesday nights she usually would have been late at the office, finalising the articles. But on Tuesday, September 5, 2017, she drove home early, around 7:30 p.m. She and her younger sister, Kavitha, had become hooked on the American tearjerker This Is Us, but Gauri’💝s TV was on the fꦓritz, and she had an evening appointment with the cable guy to fix it.
…
There are fifty lakh two-wheelers on the streets of Bangalore, more than in nearly any other city in the world. So it’s unlikely she would have paid any mind to the motorcycle with two riders that started following her nea𝓡r Netaji Memorial Park, around the corner from her house.
Her friends smile even now when they recall the crowded parties she threw in that house— small, simple, single-storey, whitended building, angular in a modernist sort of way. On party nights it would fill with conversation and cigarette smoke until 🌺nearly morning. But she lived alone, and on most nights her street was an unusually quiet and dimly lit pocket of this megacity of 💯1.2 crore people. The plots on both sides of hers were vacant and overgrown. She and the motorcycle with two riders passed a wall that read, in Kannada, ‘Thank you for your cooperation in keeping this place tidy.’ Her house was tidy, too: never any clutter indoors, and a well-kept garden in front. Two weeks earlier, Gauri’s mother had the bushy plants in Gauri’s front yard removed, afraid they might hide snakes. Gauri had planned to plant vegetables in the newly empty plots.
Gauri had made one other concession to her family’s concerns for her safety. Half a year earlier, she’d installed several clဣosed-circuit infrared TV came🀅ras on the premises— cameras that captured some, but not all, of what happened next.
Just after 8:00 p.m. she parked her car in front of her house at an indifferent angle, then jumped out to open the gate. The moment she got it open, the motorcycle’s passenger rushed up and shot her with a small semi-automatic pistol. Two bullets hit her in the abdomen, one passing through her liver. She turned to run, and the third shot missed her🌼 and struck a wall. A fourth bullet hit her in the๊ back, passing through a lung and grazing her heart. She collapsed on her front step. Blood spread across her pale blue kurta. Her chappals were still on her feet.
News of her assassination spread im🌃mediately. Over the next few hours, hundreds of Bangaloreans crowded around herꦉ house. First neighbours. Then policemen, and journalists, and the state’s home minister, and dozens of shocked friends and colleagues crowded under the kanuga tree in front of her house.
‘There was so little security,’ Gauri’s friend Chandan Gowda told me months later as he showed me the spot where she fell. ‘Everybody was here. The෴re was a semblance of a cordon, some tape, but people were just getting in underneath it. This is the evidence area. Nobody should be here. But t♑here were dozens of people. You would not believe this was the scene of a murder.’ …
Among the crowd was Malavika Avinash, a popular actress who lived nearby and who’d known Gauri since childhood. In recent years they’d become ideological opposites. Gauri’s paper was unabashedly left wing and scathing in its criticism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party; Avinash had become a BJP spokesperson. ‘There was that churning in my stomach when I heard of it—and when we actually saw her lying there, bullet-ridden,’ Avinash told a TV journalist. ‘What a way for a friend to have died. I felt the churn further in my stomach when some of her friends arrived . . . and when her body was being lifted and taken away from that compound, a lot of faces that were there we💟re looking at me and saying . . . you killed her, you rightists, you killed her. That instant reaction of politicising the whole 🎶thing.’
The crowd thinned only after midnigh♔t, when heavy rain began to fall.
The next day, protests arose nationwide, large and small. In Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Thiruvananthapuram, and many other Indian cities, crowds gathered to hold vigils and protests, bearing large banners with Gauri’s face, which they’d managed to get printed with impressive speed. In Talaguppa, a tiny place four hundred kilometres from Bangalor꧙e, a woman named Poornima stood alone for an hour in the village market square holding a placard that read I too am Gauri, then walked twenty-one kilometres to the nearest town and held up her sign for an hour there, too. Gauri’s murder seemed to capture the outrage of countless Indians in a way that few crimes ever did.
