“After I came out of Tihar Jail following the sedition case, many of my close friends had un-friended me on Facebook. They were afraid of calling me their friend. Gauri Lankesh, whom I had never met till then, called me her son and that’s Gauri Lankesh for me,” said student leader Kanhaiya Kumar who was speaking at the Bangalore Literature Festival. He released the book “The Way I see it: Gauri Lankesh Reader.”
In a very emotional speech, Mr. Kumar recounted his relationship with Gauri Lankesh. “She called me a communist and Jignesh Mewani, an Ambedkarite, her sons. She was a pond where different animals could quench their thirst. While she was a serious political activist, she was very warm and caring in her personal life,” he said. She called me ‘sweety’ and often told me to first finish my PhD and enquired if I had any girl-friends, to which I used to chide her saying she was becoming like any mother, he recounted.
Gauri Lankesh, he said, had become the symbol of all pro-people’s struggle and the fight against any censorship. Once when I asked her about safety at home, where she lived alone, she said she had installed CCTV cameras, but said if the fear of death became more, the fight would become weaker, he said. “When I asked her whether she had fought with her former husband, she quipped that when there was the State to fight with, why fight with husband. We need to continue to fight with a critical understanding and rationality,” he said.
