After journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh’s brutal murder , discussions, both online and offline, have largely been focussed on her. There is a great deal of speculation about who killed her, and why. The spotlight of many of these conversations has also tended to move to the subject of women in the media.
In these exchanges, a surprisingly large number of people have said that journalism is not a safe place for women. Some have said women should not be journalists and others have said that women, even if they choose to be in the media, must not voice strong opinions. A few have even shockingly said that no one would kill an opinionated woman if she stayed at home. What is dismaying is that these attitudes are not just held by laypeople, but by some journalists too, as I found out recently.
At a tea shop
A few days back, after a press meet, a bunch of reporters parked their bikes near a shop that sold cigarettes, gutka, and tea, and sat down to discuss the case passionately. Opinions were varied. A reporter from a television news channel said he was surprised by the national and international interest that Lankesh’s death had generated. A couple said Lankesh had been very critical of the right wing and did not mince her words after the National Democratic Alliance came to power. Some felt her activism had made her a target rather than her journalistic work. A few said she had inherited her father editor and writer P. Lankesh’s courage. Some wondered if she had been ‘too provocative’.
In this din, a senior journalist, who had been silent until then, told me that his office had recently hired three people, of whom two were women. “That is 66%,” he said. “Who said this is a man’s world?” A photographer said he had just visited his nephew in a journalism college in Bengaluru and was astonished to find a large number of girls there. “It seemed as if I had entered a girls’ college,” he said. A young man hoped that women from these journalism colleges were posted to district towns, so that he could see “pretty faces” everyday and “work would be more interesting”. Yet another said that “jeans-clad women with hyphenated surnames” were hired these days and all they do is write “ Kagakka-Gubbakka stories (fairy tales)”. Women don’t understand politics and they don’t write about politics in a way that others can understand, he remarked. “Why don’t they stick to the arts?”
These remarks were appalling, but then I imagined Lankesh sitting amongst these men. Having heard and read her for years, I wondered what she would have said to all these remarks. “ Lo maga! (Oh, boy!), will you all keep quiet now?” she may have said. “I can clearly see what men have done to journalism all these years.”
We live in a world where women report on terror, politics, business and much more; yet some men don’t see them as their equals. It’s almost as though Gauri Lankesh’s death shows us a measure of her intellect and courage, and she was there in this group to prove them all wrong.
