Illiberal India: Gauri Lankesh and the Age of Unreason

5 September 2017: journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh was shot to death by unidentified gunmen. The murder followed the style of previous murders of rationalists M.M. Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar. Gauri Lankesh was a fierce critic of the growing Hindutva faction in Karnataka and India. Her increasingly strident stance on separate religion-status for Lingayatism too won her many foes. Equally, her commentary won her admirers across the country. Fluent in Kannada and English, Lankesh was a particular threat to her ideological enemies – able to reach the influencers through a language of power and a wider audience at the grassroots through her mother tongue. In Illiberal India, senior journalist and analyst Chidanand Rajghatta examines the volatile political landscape that is the background to the murder that chilled the nation.