By P.T. Bopanna
It is shocking for me to note that the accused in the murder of my former colleague Gauri Lankesh has won the just concluded election to the Jalna Municipal Corporation in Maharashtra.
Shrikant Pangarkar, accused in the 2017 Gauri Lankesh murder case, has won the election as an independent candidate.
There is something seriously wrong with Indian electoral system where a person facing serious criminal case being allowed to contest elections. Pangarkar was granted bail by the Karnataka High Court in September, 2024.
Gauri Lankesh was my colleagues at the Times in the mid-1980s. After she left the Times, I rarely used to see her. I visited her office a couple of times at Gandhi Bazaar in Basavanagudi where I used to live. She had offered to bring out the Kannada translation of my book ‘Rise and Fall of the Coorg State’.
Gauri, who had Leftist leanings, had visited Kodagu during the Diddalli tribal agitation along with Jignesh Mevani, a tribal leader from Gujarat.
A few weeks before her murder allegedly by Hindu extremists, one of my articles titled ‘Are Kodavas (Coorgs) Hindus?’ was shared by her on Facebook. The article must have touched a chord in her. I had posted the link to my article during a discussion on a post by Machimanda Appaiah Deviah, former journalist, who had suggested that Kodavas deserved a separate religious status, more than anybody else.
My article on how the Kodavas were losing their religious moorings and getting increasingly influenced by Brahmanism, must have appealed to her as she was opposed to dogmatic Hinduism. Probably, this was the reason she shared my article link.
I used to see her Facebook posts daily and used to get a feeling that she was exposing herself to danger as there has been a growing intolerance to free thinking over the years prior to her murder.
The murderers of Gauri may have succeeded in stifling her voice, but her ideas will live on forever.
