Members of the National Human Rights and Crime Control Organisation in a candle-light vigil in Amritsar on Friday, to condemn the killing of journalist Gauri Lankesh. (PTI Photo/File)
Gauri Lankesh raged against the world. A world of injustice, inequality, squalor, discrimination, violence, plunder, and greed. Gauri had a dream. That there could be an end to such injustice in our times. Both the rage and the dream were part of the weekly, Gauri Lankesh Patrike, that she brought out, against all odds, including, as her death proves, threats to her person.
The “vernacular” press, to use that disparaging term coined in the colonial period for Indian language papers and journals, is often seen as the seed bed of gossip, “alternative facts”, and virulent opinions. Today, it is regional journalists who are providing robust ways of thinking about our present, and are paying the costs as well. As our English TV channels continue their inglorious competitions, it is the regional journalists that sustain us, and give us hope.
When P. Lankesh brought out the pioneering Lankesh Patrike, and ran it for several decades successfully, he combined a relentless focus on assorted political manoeuvers, religious practices, corporate strategies — especially in Karnataka — with thoughtful commentary, literary verve, humour and sharp insight.
Gauri had an opportunity to walk away from this legacy, since she was already in English journalism. That she took on her father’s mantle, in every good sense of the term, was an achievement for an ambitious young woman. She could have thrown in her gloves when differences with her brother arose over an interview with Saket Rajan — a writer and Marxist ideologue, pulled out of the Chikmagalur forests and killed in an “encounter” in 2005. Instead, she began her own paper, Gauri Lankesh Patrike, and retained most of her father’s thrust.
Each issue provided exposes, from the panchayat level to the state, analyses, investigations (particularly, but not only of corporate criminality) as well as opinion, humour and book and film reviews. Like Lankesh, she supported the literary ambitions of many young thinkers and writers, though the seniors had moved on.
In her lifetime, she held up the best of the “muckraking” tradition of journalism, which had its roots in the early 20th century US: Did we know what went into the making of a sausage until Upton Sinclair wrote his searing account of The Jungle? Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, who showed that the gilded age was perhaps not so gilded after all — made it possible to challenge and alter American public policy.
Gauri was not nearly as successful, but that did not stop her from trying. The Patrike’s irreverence was palpable: Former Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa is referred to as Yeddy, while the current CM is Siddu. In the September 5 issue of Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a miffed BJP MP is reported as darkly warning against current Irrigation Minister M.B. Patil’s use of the singular (as opposed to the plural) to refer to Yeddyurappa: “Who knows what will happen if ekavachana is used (for this important leader of the Lingayats) again?”
Who knows indeed what lay behind the brutal murder of a brave woman, a tabloid, and a way of thinking that challenged the establishment in every sense of the term, and at every level? Consider the contents of the September 5 alone. There is Gauri’s own editorial on the triple talaq judgment, which is more of a sobering reminder that we should not place all our bets on the judiciary, which has reduced an adult Indian woman, Hadiya, to imprisonment by her family. There is an expose of the local “cheddi don” from coastal Karnataka, whom the government had stopped from using temple funds to run two private schools. Detailed reports on the lapses of local government in Mandya or Chitradurga, for instance, or of the shady transactions by which land was denotified to benefit a former chief minister are also included.
But the tabloid is not just “negative-critical”. The humour column, ‘Katte Purana’ in the faux rural dialect of Chandre Gowda, which was a staple in Lankesh’s time, remains in Gauri Lankesh Patrike, as do the film and book reviews, and short stories. A thoughtful report on two historic meetings that were held in Karnataka recently points out why they were ignored by the national press: The Ambedkar meet in Bengaluru, and the meeting on the possibility of a drought-free India in Vijayapura, centred on the recharged local water bodies in that waterless district.
That is not all. The tabloid transcended the local in a number of ways: Translations of articles in the EPW are regularly carried, for instance. There is a sober reminder of how ignorance about our own communities (the Parsis) has transformed Feroze Gandhi into a Khan, as part of a relentless campaign against the Nehruvian heritage.
This recap makes one thing clear. The daring paper caused discomfort in many quarters. Never mind that even she had recently confessed that the falling readership of tabloids, in the absence of other kinds of money-spinning activities, was a cause for concern. No-holds-barred tabloid journalism, once the flourishing space to which many laid claim, is perilously close to ending. Yet Gauri Lankesh Patrike took its readers to some very dark places in our society, while holding out the hope of change.
It was to kill the spirit and provocations of Gauri Lankesh Patrike that Gauri Lankesh had to be killed. Her family honoured her memory by avoiding religious rites at her funeral. That the state, against which she had railed all her life, stepped in to accord her its honours would have caused her no small anguish. But in her death, judging from the widespread revulsion, horror and anger, and the new determination to end such virulence, she may have produced, at last, the unity she had longed for in her lifetime.
