“Who killed Gauri Lankesh?” Her long-time colleague, friend, and noted columnist Shiv Sunder did not name any one in particular. He simply gave a list of all those people, for whom Gauri was a weekly threat, and left the rest to the imagination of the listeners.
“Gauri was the idea of India that the freedom movement gave birth to,” Shiv Sunder said, delivering the Gauri Lankesh commemoration lecture here on Friday as part of a protest meeting organised by Save India Forum.
“If death is silence, Gauri is not silent, evident from the protests reverberating across the country since her murder. Her ideas are heard more now,” Mr. Sunder said, giving an account of the evolution of Gauri Lankesh into a spitfire journalist that she was over a span of 15 years.
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“She was an advocate of the Adivasis, Dalits, women, transgender individuals, and gays all put together. Over the years, her sympathy for the deprived masses developed into empathy. She was an intellectual who practised what she read,” he observed.
Mr. Sunder also explained the events that led to her detachment from Lankesh Patrike that her father P. Lankesh had started and the founding of Gauri Lankesh Patrike .
“There were four bullets in her body. The first was fired from behind. I suppose it was from all those journalists who betrayed the profession. The second and third on her chest could be the corporate world and the Hindutva world, and the fourth on her temple could be from the State itself,” he said.
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Opening the meeting earlier, Dalit activist Jignesh Mevani said Gauri died because of her stance in defence of all that the Constitution guaranteed. He demanded that her murderers be arrested immediately.
Earlier, artists K. Prabhakaran, Kabita Mukhopadhyaya, Sunil Ashokapuram, E. Sudhakaran, and K. Sudhesh marked their protest on a long canvas at the venue. Photojournalist Prakash Karimba’s street play Attakkalam was staged on the occasion.