The Karnataka High Court granted bail earlier this week to three of the accused arrested in connection with the murder of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh. The three accused, Amit Degwekar, HL Suresh and KT Naveen Kumar, had sought bail citing delay in the trial. The bail order comes within months of bail granted to Mohan Nayak in December last year by the same court; the government filed a Special Leave Petition (SLP) in the Supreme Court challenging the bail to him. In all, 17 people were arrested, almost all of them from the extreme right wing organisations including Sanatan Sanstha, for plotting and murdering Lankesh, a respected and outspoken bi-lingual journalist, on September 5, 2017 outside her home, in retaliation for her writing.
Nayak, 56, was allegedly a member of the right-wing organised crime syndicate that carried out the shooting of Gauri Lankesh as she returned from work that evening, and is alleged to have provided logistics, including the renting of a house, to shelter the shooters who carried out the murder. A Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Karnataka Police was formed and has since been on the case. The reason cited for bail — delay in the trial — is highly condemnable and has led to the wide public perception that ideological differences leading to, or resulting in, murders of opponents is par for the course. The shooters are beginning to be venerated, a la Nathuram Godse.
Lankesh was one of the handful of such murders that included the gunning down of rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar and Comrade Govind Pansare in Maharashtra, and Dr MM Kalaburgi in Karnataka itself. In every case, the accused belonged to a rabid right-wing organisation and the trials have stretched beyond belief or, as in the Dabholkar case, a Pune court convicted only two and let off many due to lack of evidence 11 years after the murder; importantly, it flagged off serious lapses in the probe. The lack of swift and purposeful action in these murders is highly divisive and damaging for Indian society, especially for those who stand in dissent or write in criticism of rabid right-wing ideology. Swift trials and punishments would have sent the important message: ideological opponents must be debated with, not shot dead.
