February 10, 2025 • 48 mins
When an outspoken journalist in India was assassinated in September of 2017, it shocked the world. The conspiracy that was uncovered by journalists and investigators was disturbing. Author Rollo Romig tells me the story at the center of his book: I Am on the Hit List.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You know, everyone who she'd ever insulted in her paper
became a suspect. That's a long list.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:47):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details by behind their stories.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
When an outspoken journalist in India was assassinated in September
of twenty seventeen, it shocked the world. The conspiracy that
was uncovered by journalists and investigators was disturbing. Author Rollo
Romig tells me the story at the center of his book,
I Am on the hit List. When you pitch this
(01:23):
to New York Times magazine, what was your one paragraph
pitch I mean, how do you summarize the story of
a female journalist who, of course we've read about all
over the world female journalists being murdered, and usually for
political reasons. But how do you pitch this to the
New York Times magazine where they say, oh, okay, our
readers will read this story.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, and you know, it could be a little tough
to get people to read stories that happen outside of
their own country. You know, it can be a little
bit of a tough sell. You know, there's a lot
that needs to be explained to you. There's a lot
you need to get caught up on. I had to
learn a lot about India, you know, when I started
going there, before I could even kind of begin to
understand it, and then about it. It's funny though, you know,
I as soon as it happened, I was about to
(02:04):
pitch it to my editor at the Times magazine, and
before I got a chance to, she came to me
and asked me if I wanted to write about it.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, that's nice, Yeah, that is nice.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
It's nice.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
So that and then it sees me the work if
I had to do a pitch, I love that. But
you know, but it was that kind of story where
it just there was obviously something going on here, you know,
and I think my editor's feeling and my feeling was
this too, that it seemed emblematic of just this sinking
feeling of where things are going in India because things
have taken a really harsh turn politically, you know, over
(02:35):
the past ten years. Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister
and he's with this party to be JP. You know,
they're one of these hard right parties that have become
really popular worldwide.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
And a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Of things have gotten really bad and hard in India,
and one of those things is suppression of the press.
You know, so and Gowery Lankesh was a journe and
so it's been really hard. It's become extremely hard to
do journalism in India now and there's serious repercussions for
you if you practice it freely. And so this case,
(03:13):
at that time, no one had any idea who had
murdered her or why, but it seemed like, you know,
journalists murdering on her doorstep. This is kind of a
way in to talk about this disturbing stuff that's happening.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Is being a member of the press in India akin
to being a member of the press in China. Is
it that lockdown or is it more intimidation not orders.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
It's a really interesting question. I feel like it's kind
of a mix. I feel like it's a lot more
subtle than in China. I'm not a China expert, but
just my sense is like it's a weird kind of
paradox of journalism in India because people speak really freely
in India compared to a lot of other places. You know,
it's an amazing place to do journalism because like people
just want to talk to you, and people have opinions
(03:55):
and they want to share them. You know, I love it.
And there's so much journalism. You know, it's one of
the places where newspapers are still thriving somehow, and every
form of journalism is kind of thriving. There's so much
journalism being done, and so much of it Israeli brave journalism.
From the outside, it might not look like it's being
seriously repressed.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
It is being seriously repressed though.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
In fact, I forget the organization that tracks this, but
one of these you know kind of NGOs that tracks
press suppression. It ranks India's press freedom currently as like
around Afghanistan. Seriously like that bad. It doesn't look like
it from the outside, but there's so many The tactics
are often super subtle, like if your publication is honest
(04:39):
about things, you're going to get a tax raid or
your editor's going to get orders from someone in the government,
but you know behind the scenes, and you'll lose your
job if you don't comply. Increasingly journalists are going to
jail though in journalists from outside India are being sent
home or not allowed in. So there's an increasing number
(05:00):
of political prisoners who are writers in India. So that's
a lot more overt, but a lot of it is
pretty subtle.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
It's a mix.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Well, let's talk about Gowery. She inherited her newspaper from
her father right when he died in two thousand, so
this is already it's in her blood to be a
heart is reporter who reported on things like, you know,
the rights of transgender women in India, which definitely seems
to land somewhere on the political spectrum of controversy, I'm sure.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
And even that it's like you know, being transgender in India.
It's both got commonalities with kind of the social phenomenon here,
but also totally different cultural context the transgender people occupy
in India. Transgender people in India have even in some
ways had like kind of a defined cultural role in
society in a way that doesn't really we don't really
(05:55):
see here. But then some of the same problems, a
lot of the same marginal as the etc. But yeah,
so she comes from you know, her father was not
just a journalist, he just kind of changed the course
of journalism where he lives. So she's from this state
Carnatica in South India. And the crazy thing about India
(06:16):
is it's a country, but it's really in some ways
a lot more comparable to a continent. It's kind of
like Europe in a lot of ways. It's like if
Europe happened to be one big country, because it's got
so many different cultures and languages and regions and climates
and everything, you know, and like each like each state
(06:36):
has its own cinema, you know, Like we hear about Bollywood,
which is the Hindi mainstream cinema, but every state has
its own cinema and their own language, and it's got
its own styles and everything.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
It's it's incredible.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
So's she's from Karnatica and the predominant language there is Kanada,
which has nothing to do with Hindi.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
That was the language that her paper was in.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
And her father was just like he was just like
this revluetionary literary figure in Kannada, one of the most
famous Kanada writers ever. And he was already a famous novelist, filmmaker,
short story writer, playwright, poet, and then he decided to
found a tabloid newspaper and then that was his true
calling and it was like this must read newspaper that
(07:19):
just kind of like dominated the conversation, a social conversation,
the political conversation in Karnatica for twenty years. So he
was this huge figure and she kind of coincidentally went
into journalism just as a student around the same time
that he founded this newspaper, but she went on a
completely different track. She was just like a mainstream English
language journalist, just doing kind of you know, kind of
(07:42):
more regular news stories and feature stories from mainstream English
language papers. And while he was like this kind of
like punk rock figure, also incredibly literary and like bringing
in all this stuff from translation all over the world.
Like the way people talk about this newspaper of his.
They it's like the greatest newspaper that ever existed, Like
(08:02):
this weird mix of like the New York Post because
it was like super silatious and gossipy and tabloidy, but
also like the New Yorker.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, I was looking for a definition of tabloid. I
didn't know if it was tabloid as in that's the
physical layout which could be referred to in other countries,
or if it is our definition of a tabloid, which
is like she said, salaciousness.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Both okay, he did not shy away from being totally
sialacious and gossipy, and he loved it and it was
like lurid and like sex scandals and all this kind
of stuff. So when he died, he died, you know,
pretty unexpectedly, and then no one was thinking about Gowery
as falling in his footsteps, partly because she wasn't even
fluent in Canada, the language that the paper was in,
(08:45):
So why would anyone think that she would do it.
This is in the year two thousand, but there was
kind of no one else to do it at that moment.
It just kind of happened really fast, and she took
over the paper and a lot of the like the
longtime writers for the paper thought it was a terrible idea,
but she really like that really transformed her and made
her and she kind of turned her into a different person.
Having to do this, she quickly became fluent in Kandada.
(09:08):
Like that's crazy, like taking over as editor of a
paper that you're not even totally fluent in the language,
Like I cannot imagine that. And like her colleague said, like,
you know, when you write your editorials for the paper,
you know you can at first rate them in English
and will translate them. And she said, no, I'm going
to write in Condada from the beginning. And she was like, look,
I'll just write in the Condada that I know, which
(09:28):
is just colloquial, imperfect street Kanada, and just kind of
try to talk directly and I'll just be honest about
my shortcomings. And that was kind of her attitude in general,
like I'm not going to bullshit take me as I
am before then, you know, she really wasn't like a
prominent journalist and anyway, you know, she was kind of
a steady working journalist. Her personality she was kind of
a force of nature.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
She was someone who just had a lot of friends.
She threw a lot of parties, legendary parties. She was
kind of a connector of people and just like a
really warm and delightful presence in people's lives. And then
she took over as editor this paper, and that kind
of put her in a different position where suddenly she's like,
it made her super plugged into all this local stuff
(10:11):
happening all over the state, and she started becoming like
a connector of people on that level, you know. And
then increasingly, as she got more connected to all these
like local issues happening all over Connecticut, she became a
lot more activist minded.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
And she started.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Feeling like, unlike a lot of journalists, started feeling like, look,
I have a perspective here, I have a viewpoint. I'm
not going to shy away from being an activist in
my journalism. Very controversial position for journalists. Yeah, but she
was like, fuck it. I have things I want to say,
and I believe in them strongly. I don't see why
I should pretend that I'm neutral. Because I think her
(10:48):
fundamental position was neutrality is a political position in defense
of the status quo, in defense of power structures as
they are, and I see what she means. You know,
this was really meaningful for me working on this book.
Was you know, that attitude kind of rubbed off on
me as I became immersed in her life and in
(11:11):
her work. Like I found that convincing, I didn't find
everything about her approach convincing. She could be really kind
of reckless as a journalist too, you know, like she
would like she would never like if she was writing
about a crime, she would never use the word allegedly.
Oh geez, seriously, I know it's like this is pretty
standard for journalists, Like, yeah, unless someone's actually been convicted
(11:33):
of a crime, you say allegedly.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Or police say, you just say police say exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
She never would say police say, or allegedly. And her
father was like that too. They were like, fuck it,
I can tell it's true. I'm gonna call a scoundrel.
Scoundrel is something that she would say. So you didn't
pick that up, right, I didn't pick that up. No,
And she also wasn't really big on fact checking, which
exasperated her lawyer. Wow, this is not a great journalist practice.
(11:57):
So you know, so a lot of people, even her colleagues,
would sometimes get exasperated by this stuff and they'd be like, awry,
come on, you got a fact check. But she's like, no,
time is short.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Now I understand why she was traveling so much to
deal with defamation lawsuits and stuff. Right, you said she
was on the road, and it was a lot of
times it was either reporting or defamation stuff.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
So she actually got sued for defamation a lot. And
it's interesting thing because it's a mix because it's actually
super routine for journalists, and then you get sued for defamation, oh, terrifying.
So it's like in the US, it's actually really hard
to win a defamator or even file a defamation case
against a journalist. We've got really strong First Amendment freedom
of speech protections. It's really really hard to win a
(12:39):
defamation case. People use it to harassed journalists because if
you file a case against someone, even if you don't
win it, it forces the journalists to waste their time
in court.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
In money they have to defend themselves.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Exactly, and you can file cases and jurisdictions like all
over the state and kind of force them to travel
to do that Gollery unfortunately opened her herself up to
probably more of that than was even necessary because she
could be, you know, a little loose with stuff, but
it would have happened anyway. To be clear, she actually
lost a defamation case not long before she died and
(13:14):
was sentenced to a fine and some jail time. While
she appealed it, that jail sentence was suspended.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
What do you think were her most passionate advocacy pieces
that she had written that probably elicited to the most
hatred from people or threats or defamation lawsuits.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
What were the real key sticking points here?
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Do you think it was a lot of stuff. I
mean she covered a lot of ground. Her newspaper covered
all kinds of things, but increasingly became like a single minded,
leade political paper that was really taking aim at what
was happening in the country under the current ruling party,
the BJP. Her particular passion, both as a journalist and
as an activist was what in India has known as
(13:55):
communal harmony, so basically harmony between different religious groups and
other communities. So like in India, when people talk about
a communal riot, they're talking about a riot between two
different religious communities. You know, it's really interesting. India has
this incredible culture and history of syncretism, meaning these kind
(14:18):
of like hybrid religious practices. So, I mean, Hinduism is
such a fascinating and amazing religion. In one of the
many ways it's so fascinating is that it can kind
of absorb anything, you know, it can be almost anything.
It's really hard to define exactly what Hinduism is in
kind of any universally satisfying way, because you know, you
(14:40):
can't say it's polytheistic, because there are monotheistic Hindus, there
are atheistic Hindus. Hindus you know, in some places, in
some regions, in some situations have just easily absorbed Christian
ideas into their practice, have absorbed Muslim ideas into their practice.
And it goes the other way too, where local Muslims
will kind of like develop a certain ritual around a
(15:02):
certain local temple, you know. And there's even in some places,
like in Kerala, which is another state in the South,
there are some wonderful like narrative traditions of these kinds
of like these meetings between figures and deities of different religions.
And then there are these sites where people will perform
(15:24):
religious rituals kind of collectively. Sometimes it's just like you know,
like I know this for example, like there's this mosque
in Kerala where a lot of Hindus bring their children
when they're like school age, because you know, Islam is
associated it's like a religion of the book and like
you know, they bring them there to take it blessed
as they learn how to read that kind of thing. Okay,
(15:46):
So a lot of really interesting stuff like that. But
in Karnatica, the state where Gouri is from, there's probably
more of these kind of sites than anywhere. Places where
both Hindus and Muslims and sometimes also Christians have developed
really religious traditions are on one site and so really fascinating,
wonderful laces, and they're just kind of emblematic of like
(16:06):
what's possible in terms of harmony and community and getting along.
And increasingly the right wing wants to destroy these places.
They're targeting these places and trying to say no, these
places are just for Hindus.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
Everyone else has to leave under threat of violence. So
that was happening.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
She saw that happening in her state and became a
strong champion of defending the character of harmony in these places,
just to try to protect this sense of like shared
community in her state. That was something that she really
wrote about a lot and really became an activist on
more than anything else.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Well, we've taken a long time to get to the
actual crime because I mean, everything else around it is
more interesting it is. Why don't you set up that
day or however far back you want to go a
couple days beforehand. You know what she's dealing with, defamation lawsuits.
Will you tell me a little bit about the underpants
part of this story. I don't know if it plays
(17:09):
into it or not, but this is a I mean,
I think this is one interesting example of sort of
the way she would like to gig people in charge.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
So yeah, so her paper was super irreverent.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So, like I said, it's a political paper, it's got
all these objectives, but it was very irreverent. Lots of comedy,
lots of just like jeering. It's a tabloid.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
One thing that autocrats hate is being mocked, Yes, and
she would just go for that. So one thing that
she would really go after. So like until recently, this
is super complicated. But the BJP, the ruling party. They're
actually sort of they have a parent organization which is
called the RSS, which is this enormous right wing militia.
(17:50):
Actually they're like this paramilitary and it's the largest organization
in the world, like period of any kind, and it's
also obviously the largest right wing organization in the world.
And they, you know, they do these drills like these daily,
kind of like paramilitary drills, like members of the different
groups in the RSS. And until recently, they would always
(18:13):
wear shorts, like these khaki shorts, and they always got
made fun of a lot for their shorts. And in
a lot of Indian languages, the word for shorts and
the word for underwear or underpants is the same chatty,
And so she would just incessantly refer to them as chatties,
meaning like short, like these shorts guys. But it's also
another way of just saying underpants, So super juvenile stuff.
(18:35):
But you know, it's funny how that comes up too.
Like the there was elsewhere in Karnatica, there was another
there was this big notorious incident where kind of an
a flex of power, this right wing group affiliated with
the ruling party attacked a pub in this coastal city
called Mangalore, and because like a bunch of like young
men and women were all having a party there together,
(18:58):
and then they attacked this pub and like brutally beat
the people who are attending the pub, men and women
on camera. Like the thugs invited a news crew to come,
and they were basically saying, this is against Hindu values
for women to be drinking in public, and that was
their reasoning. In response to that, some activists got together
(19:20):
and the right wing group that kind of staged this,
they launched this national campaign of mailing them pink panties
in just in order to embarrass them, you know. But
they called it the pink chotty campaign. So same thing
like that word for underwear. So there is a lot
of activism around underwear, I guess. But yeah, this is
very typical in the way that she wrote in her paper,
(19:42):
like she would exclusively refer to RSS members as chotties.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Well, let's get to that night. Tell me what happens. However,
many days in advance, you want to tell me, describe
what her schedule was like.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
She worked NonStop because she had so much going on.
She was running this paper. She had all the these
activist commitments. Her friends and colleagues are always urger to
take time off, take a break. She never did.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
She's not married or have kids or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
She wasn't married, but she was very devoted to her niece.
That was the one thing that she would ever take
a break for is every weekend spending time with her niece.
So she was really devoted to and kind of like,
you know, her niece thought of her as kind of
a second mother because her mother, Gary's sisters, was a
single mother, and so the two of them were just
kind of the two biggest figures in this girl's life.
(20:32):
Other than that, she was just she'd never stopped working,
never stopped moving, stayed up late every night, didn't take
care of herself, didn't exercise, didn't eat right, smoked way
too much, and her paper was not doing well. It
was failing at the time of her murder, which makes
it all the more striking that she was murdered, Like
why take out this woman whose paper is genuinely failing,
(20:58):
Like there was a lot of doubt at the moment
that she was killed with how long it would survive.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Why what changed from her when she took it over
from her father.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
A lot of things changed.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
I mean, part of it was that, you know, she
was delivering something very different than he did, and that
thing that she was delivering just had a smaller audience.
You know. A lot of it was just like tabloids
all over were kind of falling apart. That that same
year was like I heard one journalists call it the
year of the Death of the tabloids. So many tabloid
(21:28):
newspapers sprouted up inspired by her father's paper, and then
there was this whole field of competing tabloids, all of
them with different specialties, and they were kind of that year,
they were kind of all dying one by one, you know,
the kind of usual suspect of reasons. People are using
smartphones more, all that kind of stuff. So it just
was like a really but then also just increasing suppression
(21:51):
of journalism. It just became harder and harder to do
journalism and to run a public an independent publication, so
it was getting really, really hard. She was really saying
that she might have to close the paper soon. She
never ran ads in the newspaper. That was part of
her way of maintaining independence and integrity. She never ran ads,
(22:12):
which made Margins really tight. She was reliant just on
subscriptions and newsstand sales, and she was considering like maybe
I should actually start running some ads in a limited
way when she died, but then she never did, so
that's where it was. So it was kind of like
when she was murdered that night of September fifth, twenty seventeen.
A big part of the mystery was why was she targeted?
(22:35):
Because no one took credit, no one left a manifesto
explaining why they did it. It seemed to be part
of a pattern of murders.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Actually, yeah, describe it because is this typical the way
that this murder happened. Is this typical in India? Do
you think?
Speaker 4 (22:52):
I mean?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Describe what happened that night?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Extremely not usual. That was one of the reasons why
it was so shocking. So she know she was coming
home alone. She just got out of her car to
open the gate to drive her car in to her
driveway and that's when she was shot. And it was
two men on a motorcycle, one of whom jumped down
and shot her with a pistol. It was captured on
(23:14):
a CCTV camera that she had in her yard. Very
grainy footage though, was so it was hard to see
what was going on. He was wearing a helmet, but
he only appears for six seconds, that's how quick. It was,
so very little for the police to go off of.
But it was immediately obvious that it fit this very
clear pattern of writers who'd been murdered in the exact
(23:35):
same way, and none of those cases had been solved.
The first one was in twenty thirteen, there were two
murders in twenty fifteen, and then Gowery in twenty seventeen.
Each of the three previous victims were older men with
kind of progressive ideas who were shot on their doorstep
by two men on a motorcycle, exact same pattern, even
(23:58):
the same kind of gun, so it seemed pretty clearly
definitely the same mo and almost certainly the same killers.
But none of those cases had gone anywhere. All three
of those previous cases seemed to have gone cold. There
was a lot of police incompetence around those cases, sometimes
just ordinary incompetence, some of it just flamboyant competence, like
(24:23):
for one of the cases. For the first case, this
raider Nerenda Doublcar. He was what you'd call a rationalist.
He was just this adamant anti religious figure and big.
His whole life's mission was to debunk religious charlatans who
try to trick people out of their money with fake
miracles and scams, and also to kind of like you know,
(24:44):
undermine cults and stuff like this. So he was doing
all this kind of work. His work was really fun.
He actually had this whole road show, which actually his
colleagues still do, where it was almost like doing magic
tricks in reverse, where they'd show all these tricks that
some of these religious charlatans do, like setting water on
fire or whatever it is, and they would show the
(25:05):
audience the trick and then they'd show them how it's
done in order to prove like none of these are miracles,
you know. And people love these shows, like they attract
like a raucous audience who loves the show.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
So that was him, he was.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
But he you know, he was shot dead in his
house in twenty thirteen and the case was.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Going nowhere, and then the.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Chief of police of Pune, the city where he was killed,
hired a spirit medium, a former police officer who had
quit the force and had switched careers into becoming a
spirit medium.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Which pays better, I'm assuming than being a police officer.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I guess Robbie probably makes more money. And he claimed
that he could contact Narender Dabelkr's spirit the murder victim,
and that he could tell him what had happened. And
obviously this wasted a lot of time. They did not
get any good leads out of this approach, and meanwhile,
the real killers were free and evidence was disappearing.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
This series of three murders that happens before Gowery's murder,
all of this, to me is very chilling because it
ties into the title of your book, which is the
idea that there is a hit list of progressive journalists
and gallery would fit into that. And doesn't she at
some point say, oh, yeah, I should be on that list.
(26:27):
And she puts herself down exactly on the list as
number four, and she turns out to be number four
actually on murdered in this area.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Yeah, yeah, And so this is something that she would
joke about, like there clearly was a list, you know that,
like there are three people had been killed, and she
would joke about it. That's where the title comes from,
I am on the hit list. She would say that
as a joke with just this bravado. People would constantly
ask her, aren't you worried? Aren't you afraid? Shouldn't you
may take more caution? And she would just scoff at them,
(26:56):
and she was like, no one cares about me, No
one's coming after me giving me. At the same time,
she yeah, right, she made a list. She made her
own list of who she thought was likely to be killed,
and she put herself on it.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
So it's hard to know exactly what she was thinking there.
Was she trying to convince herself that she shouldn't be scared.
Did she just have mixed feelings about it?
Speaker 4 (27:20):
I don't know. I mean, I'm.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Sure it would have been just too paralyzing to go
to work every day and think I'm going to get
shot over this, And so in that kind of like
Gallows humor way that some journalists have, she joked about
it just as a way of getting past it.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
I guess the.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
CCTV camera in her yard was like the only thing
she would do that was like the single precaution that
she took. And then like, you know, like she could
have she was eligible. She was threatened enough that she
was actually eligible for around the clock police protection. Wow,
she could have gotten that, and she was like, hell, no,
I can't do journalism if I've followed around by a cop.
(27:58):
And she'd never even thought about it doing that.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
So tell me about the police investigation. She has killed.
The man hops back on the motorcycle, they take off.
The CCTV that is in her yard is fuzzy and
it doesn't seemingly at the beginning, look like it's going
to be very helpful. Number One, are we dealing with
the Bangalore police? Are they any good in this situation?
I guess start there. Are we talking about a good
(28:23):
police investigation from the beginning?
Speaker 2 (28:25):
I mean, they got a lot of problems. All the
Endian police have a lot of problems. There's just such
an incredible amount of corruption in the Indian police. They
also just don't have enough resources. Partly they're corrupt because
they literally can't afford to do investigations, you know, like
they have to sometimes like they have to ask for
(28:47):
money from a victim's family even just to do like
the driving around that is necessary to perform a real investigation.
You know, they often can't afford to feed prisoners in
their custody and they have to come up with solutions
to that, so it's really a mess. And then in
some cases the police themselves are compromised by some of
(29:10):
these political forces. Police have been known to participate in
religious riots and help coordinate their religious rights instead of
stopping them. So lots of different problems. The problem of
not having enough resources was not really a problem in
Gowery's case. It was such a high profile case. They
actually put together a special investigation team that had hundreds
(29:34):
of officers on it at first, hundreds of officers assigned
at once to this one case. Even so, expectations were
really low, partly given the track record of these three
previous murder cases, investigations not going anywhere, and just also
the fact that they just seem to make no progress.
The politicians who were in office at the time, like
(29:55):
the Home Minister of the state, talked really big, saying, oh, oh,
we're going to have a breakthrough immediately, we'd basically know
who did it. We're going to arrest people, it's right
around the corner. And then it didn't happen, and so
people start getting really cynical about it, and months passed,
and you know, I returned to India and people her
friends were mostly saying, this is going nowhere. There were
(30:18):
a lot of theories in the meanwhile, like in this
vacuum of information, there were so many different theories about
what happened to her. So obviously a lot of people
suspected the right wing, some faction of the right wing,
because that was who she had been railing against in
her paper predominantly, But there were a lot of other
things that people throughout. She had had a kind of
(30:41):
conflict with her brother. At one point there was a
rumor that he'd like waved a gun at her years ago,
so people were talking about her brother. People were like,
maybe it was a land dispute that went wrong. There
was no evidence that there was a land dispute, but
most conflicts in Bangalore seemed to come down to a
land dispute, so it was a reasonable guess. You know,
everyone who she'd ever insulted in her paper became a suspect.
(31:05):
That's a long list. Some of them weren't even political figures,
you know. And the right wing, being accused of complicity,
turned it around and said, we think it was the
left wing. So you know, I mentioned before these maoist
radicals who are kind of at war with the Indian government.
She'd written about them in her paper with some sympathy.
(31:28):
She was entirely opposed to their violence. She thought it
was completely stupid, but she'd wrote about their cause with
some sympathy in her paper, and she actually became part
of a project to try to help Naxalites who wanted
to leave the movement, to help them come out from
the underground and kind of rejoin mainstream society. It was
(31:50):
pretty successful, actually, she helped, you know, several local Naxalites
kind of get out and you know, take a different
path in life, and in collaboration with the government, crucially
with the local state government. And so the right wing
a lot of them were saying, oh, well, maybe some
actuletes were mad at her about that, so they shot her.
(32:11):
So all these different theories and no one knew what
was going on for I think it was about six
months before there were finally some arrests.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Okay, so tell me about that. How do they sift
through I mean they're looking through all of these different people,
and you said, nobody took credit and people were confused
because her paper was failing. But we know it's perception
whoever killed her thought she was worth murdering whatever she did.
You know, even if it's something to us that seems minor,
(32:40):
it is obviously serious enough for someone else to kill over.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
So what ultimately happens here?
Speaker 2 (32:47):
So I want to talk about that question of why
she was killed, because it was kind of confusing that
she would be targeted even though her paper was failing.
But kind of the assumption behind that premise is that
she was definitely targeted because of her paper, And I
think this is where, honestly, this is the thing that
became the most important part to me about this book
(33:09):
is that I felt like in studying Gowerie's life, I
learned so much about how to live a life, and
it made me think so much about how to live
a life, and like there was this understandable assumption when
she was murdered that she'd been murdered because of her journalists,
because she was a journalist, and because this is a
pattern that we recognize of journalists being silenced. Her paper
(33:31):
wasn't super successful in the end, but I came to
see it as I think her true talents were kind
of misidentified in the popular consciousness. She was actually a
truly extraordinary person, but her true talents were things that
often get dismissed or undervalued. In my mind, this is
(33:52):
really a book about how a society works, Like how
is what makes a society healthy and the people doing
thankless work to make a society healthy. And I really
think Gorie was one of those people, and that so
much of what makes a society healthy and good is
it's about community and relationships and friendships and care and
(34:17):
kind of filling in these gaps of things that government
can't or won't do, you know. And in addition to
everything that she's doing as a journalist, she had this
extraordinary network of friendship and community and making connections between communities.
She had like this talent for friendship and this talent
(34:38):
for making connections between disparate groups who otherwise would have
nothing to do with each other. And behind the scenes,
that was the true power of her work and of
her life. That her paper only showed a glimmer of it,
you know. But like when she died, the city of Bangalore,
like people came out in the streets, you know, by
the tens of thousands, and not just because of the
(35:00):
shock of it, and not because of her newspaper, but
because of her and because of who she meant to
them personally. And it was so surprising to so many
people who were close to her that she was close
to so many other people because she was low key
about it, you know, but she kind of filled this
role in her community that it's undervalued. It's the kind
(35:22):
of stuff that's often dismissed as like women's work, this
kind of community building, relationship building stuff, but it's the
kind of thing where, like, once you lose it, and
especially once you lose it in a shocking, sudden, violent
way like this, it's a huge setback and you immediately see, oh,
there's this big golf here because this person is gone
(35:43):
and there's not obvious who's going to fill that gap.
This was so powerful me to realize that, like she
didn't win awards as a journalist, she wasn't you know,
she certainly wasn't making money as a journalist, and she
wasn't really famous as a journalist. But what she did
with her life, through her friendships and through her talent
(36:03):
for community had such power and value in meaning for
everyone who touched her. And it just became so powerful
and moving and influential for me to talk to all
these people who she meant so much to and realized like, oh,
this is how people talk about someone who really made
(36:26):
an impact on them, you know, even if they only
met her a few times.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
And she has so much exposure to so many people.
And then you go back to this police investigation, which
must have been overwhelming, and I'm sure that her sister
and her niece were devastated by all of this, and
I'm sure that the police were feeling a lot of
pressure from people in the press, you know, to solve
(36:50):
this case. How do they eventually round up? Are we
satisfied that they found the right people here? So the
first arrest.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Happened in the spring of twenty eighteen, and the guy
they arrested, he seemed like a pretty small player in
the conspiracy to kill Gary Lankash. He was the guy
who was caught because he was the sloppiest, you know.
And actually we found out later after they all was
said and done, that he was someone who really annoyed
and exasperated his co conspirators because he was sloppy and
(37:21):
not very helpful. And his nickname was jote Manja, which
means pot bellied Manja because he had a a paunch,
but he was the one who they caught. The police
intercepted a phone call where he was talking about Garrie's
murder and kind of his sloppiness led them to everyone else.
(37:41):
The organization that killed her as a whole was very
disciplined and very careful and had a lot of protocols.
But you know, I guess it just takes one week
link to start opening this stuff up, So I do
think they caught the right people. It was this really
secretive organization, a nameless group of co conspirators that deliberately
(38:04):
didn't give a name to their group in order to
make it harder for the police. But ultimately the police
charged eighteen people of conspiring together to kill her, seventeen
of whom were arrested. One is still on the run,
and most of them, especially the senior members of the group,
were associated with this kind of fringe religious group based
(38:29):
in Goa called Sanatan Sansta, and they have an ashram
in Goa. They have a guru who runs the group.
Sanatan Sansa themselves has never been directly charged or implicated
with these crimes, which I still honestly don't understand why
there is a lot in my eyes connecting these suspects
(38:52):
to Sanatan Sansta.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
But what's what's the motive? What do they think the
motive was.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Well, it's interesting, it's it aims like very specifically. They
were responding to one thing Gower said in one speech.
She gave a lot of speeches increasingly towards the end
of her life, she gave a lot of speeches as
she kind of increasingly became an activist more than a journalist.
And she gave a speech where she was speaking about
(39:21):
Hinduism in kind of a derisive way, and she said
something to the effect of, like, Hinduism is a religion
that has no mother and father, Like you know Islam,
you know where it comes from. Christianity, who knows where
it comes from. Hinduism has no mother and father, kind
of implying that it's like a bastard religion. I'm not
even sure what her point was there. It was kind
(39:41):
of a mean thing to say, honestly, and like, it's
interesting because she was an atheist and she was kind
of baffled by religion. She was also thought it was
beautiful in a lot of ways too, Like she celebrated
all the religious holidays. She loved celebrating them with her
you know, nieces and nephew to to kind of like
explain to them the traditions. So she was interested on
(40:05):
that level, kind of more on a cultural level, but
she worried a lot that religion just did more harm
than good, I think, and sometimes, you know, a lot
of her colleagues were also atheists, but sometimes it even
made them uncomfortable, like how derisively she could speak about
religion because they were just like I spoke to one
friend of hers who just was like, obviously, no one
should be harmed for saying anything at all, but like,
(40:29):
it did make me uncomfortable when she spoke like that,
because even if I don't believe in religion, religion is
really important to people and they need it and it
helps them. You know, I'll tell you what she said
in that speech. Hinduism has no mother and father. It's
you know, it's kind of mean. But people have said
incredibly harsher things in the past in India. I mean,
(40:53):
like I said, India is a place where lots of
people just are super forthright with their opinions, and there's
a long history of people saying incredibly insulting things about
each other's religious beliefs. But only recently has this sort
of thing resulted in people getting murdered.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
And I'm sure her being a woman has to play
into it too.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Absolutely, it's clear that women are far more targeted with
all this stuff, you know, with getting like attacked online,
with getting you name it. If you're a woman, especially
a woman journalist, you're going to be in for a
lot more of it.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
So what happens there are they they're all convicted at
this seventeen out of eighteen.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
No, in fact, the trial is still going on.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Oh wow, Okay, so first arrests.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Happened almost seven years ago. It took four years after
that for the trial to start, more than four years,
even though almost all of them were arrested in the
twenty eighteen. Because the Indian justice system is just incredibly slow.
They just they don't have enough judges. There's so many
(41:58):
reasons why it's slow, but it's cases can take decades. Yeah, Like,
it's not unusual for a suspect of a crime to
sit in jail awaiting trial for longer than the maximum
sentence of the thing they're charged of.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
We're going on eight years right now from when she
was murdered.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Right exactly, we're almost eight years after the murder, So
the trial is still ongoing. Just as of like the
other day, all seventeen arrested men have been released on bail,
which is a really bad sign. Actually, it's usually a
sign in the Indian justice system that this case is
not going to go anywhere. I hope it's not the case.
(42:38):
But they're all free. And when these guys got out,
right wing groups have celebrated them openly, like they hold
parties for them and put flower garlands around their necks
and feed them sweets. That's the reception that they get
when they get out of jail.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Yeah, and you had said in your book that essentially
this seems like an awful omen about things to come.
Yeah in India, I mean, where you're just sort of
lionizing these people who are you know, creating political violence
against journalists and whomever, you know, and then they're celebrated
or or you know, even worse, they're let go.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
So I know your confidence is pretty low about that.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, and we'll see, you know, I hope I'm wrong.
I mean, Gowrie's longtime lawyer who's brilliant. He seems to
remain confident that the case, or at least hopeful that
the case will end in convictions, even despite all the problems,
the delays that everyone getting out on bail.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
We'll see.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
But you know, things are it's really tricky. You know,
things are getting worse and worse. There are so many
more political prisoners. People are restigous for transparently political reasons
and charged with terrorism. I mean, look, run Dottie Roy,
who is one of the most famous Indian novelists, has
a terrorism case against her, okay for something that she
(43:57):
said in a speech, like twelve years ago, something she
said in a speech, and she's got a terrorism charge
against her. So they're not even afraid to bring a
charge like that against one of the country's most prominent novelists,
you know. And then meanwhile, a lot of people who
are less famous are just sitting in jail as political prisoners,
sometimes dying in jail political prisoners. And the situation for
(44:21):
Muslims in general is just rapidly degenerating. Depends on the state.
Some regions are better than others. The places where the
BJP controls the state government are a lot worse, there
are states where like open programs of ethnic cleansing are
going on, where like Muslim doors are marked with paint
(44:41):
and Muslim families are being literally driven out of the
state by the dozens. So this is the kind of climate,
and yet we hardly ever hear about it. And even like,
I find that even Indians, even Indians who care about
this stuff, it's really easy not to know about it
or not to tune into it, partly because the press
has degenerated so much that it's hard to even find
coverage of some of this stuff.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
What is the message here by the end of this
you know, I mean you've talked about her life and
how it's been an inspiration for you. Yeah, and you know,
she poured so much of herself, for better or for worse,
on some of these stories that she worked on, and
then she has assassinated clearly and has become sort of
this symbol of what happens if you speak out too
(45:24):
much on the wrong thing, you know, in India. So
what do you think, Like, what was your big takeaway
here that you haven't already said from this story that
you walked away with.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
It's interesting, you know, I feel like everything you just
laid out there, you know, the stakes and the context.
So many of her friends and colleagues have just taken
very different lessons from it. You know, some have have become,
you know, understandably really scared about speaking out and have
backed away from speaking publicly about political things. Can't blame them,
(45:58):
you know, in this kind of climate where jail or
murder are possible outcomes, there literally was a hit list,
and a lot of people found their names on these lists.
You know that they were going to be next other people.
They've been emboldened by it. You know, other people have
started speaking out a lot more loudly than ever before.
(46:20):
You know that It's just like I think that maybe
they felt like enough is enough as a result. I mean,
it's easy for me, as an outsider sitting outside of
India to take whatever lesson I want. I've definitely found it.
I feel like in my life it's made me want
to be a lot more forthright about what I believe.
(46:42):
And I'm not someone who's honestly comfortable with speaking publicly
about anything really, you know, like I've been talking here
for an hour, but it's actually not what comes naturally
to me, and I tend to be more private, and
I want to kind of keep my beliefs close, but
I don't know. It's hard to spend all this time
(47:04):
with the life of Gyrie Lunkash without taking the lesson
of just you got to call things as you see them.
You know, you should actually say allegedly, and you should
you should backcheck, but you should also call it like
you see it.
Speaker 4 (47:19):
And if you know.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Something you'd be true and you believe it, then you
should make your convictions known. Sometimes you have to deal
with consequences from that. I mean, honestly, it's up in
the air whether I'm going to be allowed back in India.
I'm exactly the kind of writer who they've been leaving
out of India. I would really hate that. I have
in laws in India and I want to be back.
(47:41):
But it never made me feel like I shouldn't write
this book as a result, and part of that was
the inspiration of the subject of the book.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast tenfold more
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(48:25):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
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This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You know, everyone who she'd ever insulted in her paper
became a suspect. That's a long list.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:47):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details by behind their stories.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
When an outspoken journalist in India was assassinated in September
of twenty seventeen, it shocked the world. The conspiracy that
was uncovered by journalists and investigators was disturbing. Author Rollo
Romig tells me the story at the center of his book,
I Am on the hit List. When you pitch this
(01:23):
to New York Times magazine, what was your one paragraph
pitch I mean, how do you summarize the story of
a female journalist who, of course we've read about all
over the world female journalists being murdered, and usually for
political reasons. But how do you pitch this to the
New York Times magazine where they say, oh, okay, our
readers will read this story.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, and you know, it could be a little tough
to get people to read stories that happen outside of
their own country. You know, it can be a little
bit of a tough sell. You know, there's a lot
that needs to be explained to you. There's a lot
you need to get caught up on. I had to
learn a lot about India, you know, when I started
going there, before I could even kind of begin to
understand it, and then about it. It's funny though, you know,
I as soon as it happened, I was about to
(02:04):
pitch it to my editor at the Times magazine, and
before I got a chance to, she came to me
and asked me if I wanted to write about it.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Well, that's nice, Yeah, that is nice.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
It's nice.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
So that and then it sees me the work if
I had to do a pitch, I love that. But
you know, but it was that kind of story where
it just there was obviously something going on here, you know,
and I think my editor's feeling and my feeling was
this too, that it seemed emblematic of just this sinking
feeling of where things are going in India because things
have taken a really harsh turn politically, you know, over
(02:35):
the past ten years. Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister
and he's with this party to be JP. You know,
they're one of these hard right parties that have become
really popular worldwide.
Speaker 4 (02:47):
And a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Of things have gotten really bad and hard in India,
and one of those things is suppression of the press.
You know, so and Gowery Lankesh was a journe and
so it's been really hard. It's become extremely hard to
do journalism in India now and there's serious repercussions for
you if you practice it freely. And so this case,
(03:13):
at that time, no one had any idea who had
murdered her or why, but it seemed like, you know,
journalists murdering on her doorstep. This is kind of a
way in to talk about this disturbing stuff that's happening.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Is being a member of the press in India akin
to being a member of the press in China. Is
it that lockdown or is it more intimidation not orders.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
It's a really interesting question. I feel like it's kind
of a mix. I feel like it's a lot more
subtle than in China. I'm not a China expert, but
just my sense is like it's a weird kind of
paradox of journalism in India because people speak really freely
in India compared to a lot of other places. You know,
it's an amazing place to do journalism because like people
just want to talk to you, and people have opinions
(03:55):
and they want to share them. You know, I love it.
And there's so much journalism. You know, it's one of
the places where newspapers are still thriving somehow, and every
form of journalism is kind of thriving. There's so much
journalism being done, and so much of it Israeli brave journalism.
From the outside, it might not look like it's being
seriously repressed.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
It is being seriously repressed though.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
In fact, I forget the organization that tracks this, but
one of these you know kind of NGOs that tracks
press suppression. It ranks India's press freedom currently as like
around Afghanistan. Seriously like that bad. It doesn't look like
it from the outside, but there's so many The tactics
are often super subtle, like if your publication is honest
(04:39):
about things, you're going to get a tax raid or
your editor's going to get orders from someone in the government,
but you know behind the scenes, and you'll lose your
job if you don't comply. Increasingly journalists are going to
jail though in journalists from outside India are being sent
home or not allowed in. So there's an increasing number
(05:00):
of political prisoners who are writers in India. So that's
a lot more overt, but a lot of it is
pretty subtle.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
It's a mix.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Well, let's talk about Gowery. She inherited her newspaper from
her father right when he died in two thousand, so
this is already it's in her blood to be a
heart is reporter who reported on things like, you know,
the rights of transgender women in India, which definitely seems
to land somewhere on the political spectrum of controversy, I'm sure.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
And even that it's like you know, being transgender in India.
It's both got commonalities with kind of the social phenomenon here,
but also totally different cultural context the transgender people occupy
in India. Transgender people in India have even in some
ways had like kind of a defined cultural role in
society in a way that doesn't really we don't really
(05:55):
see here. But then some of the same problems, a
lot of the same marginal as the etc. But yeah,
so she comes from you know, her father was not
just a journalist, he just kind of changed the course
of journalism where he lives. So she's from this state
Carnatica in South India. And the crazy thing about India
(06:16):
is it's a country, but it's really in some ways
a lot more comparable to a continent. It's kind of
like Europe in a lot of ways. It's like if
Europe happened to be one big country, because it's got
so many different cultures and languages and regions and climates
and everything, you know, and like each like each state
(06:36):
has its own cinema, you know, Like we hear about Bollywood,
which is the Hindi mainstream cinema, but every state has
its own cinema and their own language, and it's got
its own styles and everything.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
It's it's incredible.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
So's she's from Karnatica and the predominant language there is Kanada,
which has nothing to do with Hindi.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
That was the language that her paper was in.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
And her father was just like he was just like
this revluetionary literary figure in Kannada, one of the most
famous Kanada writers ever. And he was already a famous novelist, filmmaker,
short story writer, playwright, poet, and then he decided to
found a tabloid newspaper and then that was his true
calling and it was like this must read newspaper that
(07:19):
just kind of like dominated the conversation, a social conversation,
the political conversation in Karnatica for twenty years. So he
was this huge figure and she kind of coincidentally went
into journalism just as a student around the same time
that he founded this newspaper, but she went on a
completely different track. She was just like a mainstream English
language journalist, just doing kind of you know, kind of
(07:42):
more regular news stories and feature stories from mainstream English
language papers. And while he was like this kind of
like punk rock figure, also incredibly literary and like bringing
in all this stuff from translation all over the world.
Like the way people talk about this newspaper of his.
They it's like the greatest newspaper that ever existed, Like
(08:02):
this weird mix of like the New York Post because
it was like super silatious and gossipy and tabloidy, but
also like the New Yorker.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, I was looking for a definition of tabloid. I
didn't know if it was tabloid as in that's the
physical layout which could be referred to in other countries,
or if it is our definition of a tabloid, which
is like she said, salaciousness.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Both okay, he did not shy away from being totally
sialacious and gossipy, and he loved it and it was
like lurid and like sex scandals and all this kind
of stuff. So when he died, he died, you know,
pretty unexpectedly, and then no one was thinking about Gowery
as falling in his footsteps, partly because she wasn't even
fluent in Canada, the language that the paper was in,
(08:45):
So why would anyone think that she would do it.
This is in the year two thousand, but there was
kind of no one else to do it at that moment.
It just kind of happened really fast, and she took
over the paper and a lot of the like the
longtime writers for the paper thought it was a terrible idea,
but she really like that really transformed her and made
her and she kind of turned her into a different person.
Having to do this, she quickly became fluent in Kandada.
(09:08):
Like that's crazy, like taking over as editor of a
paper that you're not even totally fluent in the language,
Like I cannot imagine that. And like her colleague said, like,
you know, when you write your editorials for the paper,
you know you can at first rate them in English
and will translate them. And she said, no, I'm going
to write in Condada from the beginning. And she was like, look,
I'll just write in the Condada that I know, which
(09:28):
is just colloquial, imperfect street Kanada, and just kind of
try to talk directly and I'll just be honest about
my shortcomings. And that was kind of her attitude in general,
like I'm not going to bullshit take me as I
am before then, you know, she really wasn't like a
prominent journalist and anyway, you know, she was kind of
a steady working journalist. Her personality she was kind of
a force of nature.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
She was someone who just had a lot of friends.
She threw a lot of parties, legendary parties. She was
kind of a connector of people and just like a
really warm and delightful presence in people's lives. And then
she took over as editor this paper, and that kind
of put her in a different position where suddenly she's like,
it made her super plugged into all this local stuff
(10:11):
happening all over the state, and she started becoming like
a connector of people on that level, you know. And
then increasingly, as she got more connected to all these
like local issues happening all over Connecticut, she became a
lot more activist minded.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
And she started.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Feeling like, unlike a lot of journalists, started feeling like, look,
I have a perspective here, I have a viewpoint. I'm
not going to shy away from being an activist in
my journalism. Very controversial position for journalists. Yeah, but she
was like, fuck it. I have things I want to say,
and I believe in them strongly. I don't see why
I should pretend that I'm neutral. Because I think her
(10:48):
fundamental position was neutrality is a political position in defense
of the status quo, in defense of power structures as
they are, and I see what she means. You know,
this was really meaningful for me working on this book.
Was you know, that attitude kind of rubbed off on
me as I became immersed in her life and in
(11:11):
her work. Like I found that convincing, I didn't find
everything about her approach convincing. She could be really kind
of reckless as a journalist too, you know, like she
would like she would never like if she was writing
about a crime, she would never use the word allegedly.
Oh geez, seriously, I know it's like this is pretty
standard for journalists, Like, yeah, unless someone's actually been convicted
(11:33):
of a crime, you say allegedly.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Or police say, you just say police say exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
She never would say police say, or allegedly. And her
father was like that too. They were like, fuck it,
I can tell it's true. I'm gonna call a scoundrel.
Scoundrel is something that she would say. So you didn't
pick that up, right, I didn't pick that up. No,
And she also wasn't really big on fact checking, which
exasperated her lawyer. Wow, this is not a great journalist practice.
(11:57):
So you know, so a lot of people, even her colleagues,
would sometimes get exasperated by this stuff and they'd be like, awry,
come on, you got a fact check. But she's like, no,
time is short.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Now I understand why she was traveling so much to
deal with defamation lawsuits and stuff. Right, you said she
was on the road, and it was a lot of
times it was either reporting or defamation stuff.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
So she actually got sued for defamation a lot. And
it's interesting thing because it's a mix because it's actually
super routine for journalists, and then you get sued for defamation, oh, terrifying.
So it's like in the US, it's actually really hard
to win a defamator or even file a defamation case
against a journalist. We've got really strong First Amendment freedom
of speech protections. It's really really hard to win a
(12:39):
defamation case. People use it to harassed journalists because if
you file a case against someone, even if you don't
win it, it forces the journalists to waste their time
in court.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
In money they have to defend themselves.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Exactly, and you can file cases and jurisdictions like all
over the state and kind of force them to travel
to do that Gollery unfortunately opened her herself up to
probably more of that than was even necessary because she
could be, you know, a little loose with stuff, but
it would have happened anyway. To be clear, she actually
lost a defamation case not long before she died and
(13:14):
was sentenced to a fine and some jail time. While
she appealed it, that jail sentence was suspended.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
What do you think were her most passionate advocacy pieces
that she had written that probably elicited to the most
hatred from people or threats or defamation lawsuits.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
What were the real key sticking points here?
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Do you think it was a lot of stuff. I
mean she covered a lot of ground. Her newspaper covered
all kinds of things, but increasingly became like a single minded,
leade political paper that was really taking aim at what
was happening in the country under the current ruling party,
the BJP. Her particular passion, both as a journalist and
as an activist was what in India has known as
(13:55):
communal harmony, so basically harmony between different religious groups and
other communities. So like in India, when people talk about
a communal riot, they're talking about a riot between two
different religious communities. You know, it's really interesting. India has
this incredible culture and history of syncretism, meaning these kind
(14:18):
of like hybrid religious practices. So, I mean, Hinduism is
such a fascinating and amazing religion. In one of the
many ways it's so fascinating is that it can kind
of absorb anything, you know, it can be almost anything.
It's really hard to define exactly what Hinduism is in
kind of any universally satisfying way, because you know, you
(14:40):
can't say it's polytheistic, because there are monotheistic Hindus, there
are atheistic Hindus. Hindus you know, in some places, in
some regions, in some situations have just easily absorbed Christian
ideas into their practice, have absorbed Muslim ideas into their practice.
And it goes the other way too, where local Muslims
will kind of like develop a certain ritual around a
(15:02):
certain local temple, you know. And there's even in some places,
like in Kerala, which is another state in the South,
there are some wonderful like narrative traditions of these kinds
of like these meetings between figures and deities of different religions.
And then there are these sites where people will perform
(15:24):
religious rituals kind of collectively. Sometimes it's just like you know,
like I know this for example, like there's this mosque
in Kerala where a lot of Hindus bring their children
when they're like school age, because you know, Islam is
associated it's like a religion of the book and like
you know, they bring them there to take it blessed
as they learn how to read that kind of thing. Okay,
(15:46):
So a lot of really interesting stuff like that. But
in Karnatica, the state where Gouri is from, there's probably
more of these kind of sites than anywhere. Places where
both Hindus and Muslims and sometimes also Christians have developed
really religious traditions are on one site and so really fascinating,
wonderful laces, and they're just kind of emblematic of like
(16:06):
what's possible in terms of harmony and community and getting along.
And increasingly the right wing wants to destroy these places.
They're targeting these places and trying to say no, these
places are just for Hindus.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
Everyone else has to leave under threat of violence. So
that was happening.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
She saw that happening in her state and became a
strong champion of defending the character of harmony in these places,
just to try to protect this sense of like shared
community in her state. That was something that she really
wrote about a lot and really became an activist on
more than anything else.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
Well, we've taken a long time to get to the
actual crime because I mean, everything else around it is
more interesting it is. Why don't you set up that
day or however far back you want to go a
couple days beforehand. You know what she's dealing with, defamation lawsuits.
Will you tell me a little bit about the underpants
part of this story. I don't know if it plays
(17:09):
into it or not, but this is a I mean,
I think this is one interesting example of sort of
the way she would like to gig people in charge.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
So yeah, so her paper was super irreverent.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So, like I said, it's a political paper, it's got
all these objectives, but it was very irreverent. Lots of comedy,
lots of just like jeering. It's a tabloid.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
One thing that autocrats hate is being mocked, Yes, and
she would just go for that. So one thing that
she would really go after. So like until recently, this
is super complicated. But the BJP, the ruling party. They're
actually sort of they have a parent organization which is
called the RSS, which is this enormous right wing militia.
(17:50):
Actually they're like this paramilitary and it's the largest organization
in the world, like period of any kind, and it's
also obviously the largest right wing organization in the world.
And they, you know, they do these drills like these daily,
kind of like paramilitary drills, like members of the different
groups in the RSS. And until recently, they would always
(18:13):
wear shorts, like these khaki shorts, and they always got
made fun of a lot for their shorts. And in
a lot of Indian languages, the word for shorts and
the word for underwear or underpants is the same chatty,
And so she would just incessantly refer to them as chatties,
meaning like short, like these shorts guys. But it's also
another way of just saying underpants, So super juvenile stuff.
(18:35):
But you know, it's funny how that comes up too.
Like the there was elsewhere in Karnatica, there was another
there was this big notorious incident where kind of an
a flex of power, this right wing group affiliated with
the ruling party attacked a pub in this coastal city
called Mangalore, and because like a bunch of like young
men and women were all having a party there together,
(18:58):
and then they attacked this pub and like brutally beat
the people who are attending the pub, men and women
on camera. Like the thugs invited a news crew to come,
and they were basically saying, this is against Hindu values
for women to be drinking in public, and that was
their reasoning. In response to that, some activists got together
(19:20):
and the right wing group that kind of staged this,
they launched this national campaign of mailing them pink panties
in just in order to embarrass them, you know. But
they called it the pink chotty campaign. So same thing
like that word for underwear. So there is a lot
of activism around underwear, I guess. But yeah, this is
very typical in the way that she wrote in her paper,
(19:42):
like she would exclusively refer to RSS members as chotties.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Well, let's get to that night. Tell me what happens. However,
many days in advance, you want to tell me, describe
what her schedule was like.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
She worked NonStop because she had so much going on.
She was running this paper. She had all the these
activist commitments. Her friends and colleagues are always urger to
take time off, take a break. She never did.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
She's not married or have kids or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
She wasn't married, but she was very devoted to her niece.
That was the one thing that she would ever take
a break for is every weekend spending time with her niece.
So she was really devoted to and kind of like,
you know, her niece thought of her as kind of
a second mother because her mother, Gary's sisters, was a
single mother, and so the two of them were just
kind of the two biggest figures in this girl's life.
(20:32):
Other than that, she was just she'd never stopped working,
never stopped moving, stayed up late every night, didn't take
care of herself, didn't exercise, didn't eat right, smoked way
too much, and her paper was not doing well. It
was failing at the time of her murder, which makes
it all the more striking that she was murdered, Like
why take out this woman whose paper is genuinely failing,
(20:58):
Like there was a lot of doubt at the moment
that she was killed with how long it would survive.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Why what changed from her when she took it over
from her father.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
A lot of things changed.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
I mean, part of it was that, you know, she
was delivering something very different than he did, and that
thing that she was delivering just had a smaller audience.
You know. A lot of it was just like tabloids
all over were kind of falling apart. That that same
year was like I heard one journalists call it the
year of the Death of the tabloids. So many tabloid
(21:28):
newspapers sprouted up inspired by her father's paper, and then
there was this whole field of competing tabloids, all of
them with different specialties, and they were kind of that year,
they were kind of all dying one by one, you know,
the kind of usual suspect of reasons. People are using
smartphones more, all that kind of stuff. So it just
was like a really but then also just increasing suppression
(21:51):
of journalism. It just became harder and harder to do
journalism and to run a public an independent publication, so
it was getting really, really hard. She was really saying
that she might have to close the paper soon. She
never ran ads in the newspaper. That was part of
her way of maintaining independence and integrity. She never ran ads,
(22:12):
which made Margins really tight. She was reliant just on
subscriptions and newsstand sales, and she was considering like maybe
I should actually start running some ads in a limited
way when she died, but then she never did, so
that's where it was. So it was kind of like
when she was murdered that night of September fifth, twenty seventeen.
A big part of the mystery was why was she targeted?
(22:35):
Because no one took credit, no one left a manifesto
explaining why they did it. It seemed to be part
of a pattern of murders.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Actually, yeah, describe it because is this typical the way
that this murder happened. Is this typical in India? Do
you think?
Speaker 4 (22:52):
I mean?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Describe what happened that night?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Extremely not usual. That was one of the reasons why
it was so shocking. So she know she was coming
home alone. She just got out of her car to
open the gate to drive her car in to her
driveway and that's when she was shot. And it was
two men on a motorcycle, one of whom jumped down
and shot her with a pistol. It was captured on
(23:14):
a CCTV camera that she had in her yard. Very
grainy footage though, was so it was hard to see
what was going on. He was wearing a helmet, but
he only appears for six seconds, that's how quick. It was,
so very little for the police to go off of.
But it was immediately obvious that it fit this very
clear pattern of writers who'd been murdered in the exact
(23:35):
same way, and none of those cases had been solved.
The first one was in twenty thirteen, there were two
murders in twenty fifteen, and then Gowery in twenty seventeen.
Each of the three previous victims were older men with
kind of progressive ideas who were shot on their doorstep
by two men on a motorcycle, exact same pattern, even
(23:58):
the same kind of gun, so it seemed pretty clearly
definitely the same mo and almost certainly the same killers.
But none of those cases had gone anywhere. All three
of those previous cases seemed to have gone cold. There
was a lot of police incompetence around those cases, sometimes
just ordinary incompetence, some of it just flamboyant competence, like
(24:23):
for one of the cases. For the first case, this
raider Nerenda Doublcar. He was what you'd call a rationalist.
He was just this adamant anti religious figure and big.
His whole life's mission was to debunk religious charlatans who
try to trick people out of their money with fake
miracles and scams, and also to kind of like you know,
(24:44):
undermine cults and stuff like this. So he was doing
all this kind of work. His work was really fun.
He actually had this whole road show, which actually his
colleagues still do, where it was almost like doing magic
tricks in reverse, where they'd show all these tricks that
some of these religious charlatans do, like setting water on
fire or whatever it is, and they would show the
(25:05):
audience the trick and then they'd show them how it's
done in order to prove like none of these are miracles,
you know. And people love these shows, like they attract
like a raucous audience who loves the show.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
So that was him, he was.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
But he you know, he was shot dead in his
house in twenty thirteen and the case was.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Going nowhere, and then the.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Chief of police of Pune, the city where he was killed,
hired a spirit medium, a former police officer who had
quit the force and had switched careers into becoming a
spirit medium.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Which pays better, I'm assuming than being a police officer.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
I guess Robbie probably makes more money. And he claimed
that he could contact Narender Dabelkr's spirit the murder victim,
and that he could tell him what had happened. And
obviously this wasted a lot of time. They did not
get any good leads out of this approach, and meanwhile,
the real killers were free and evidence was disappearing.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
This series of three murders that happens before Gowery's murder,
all of this, to me is very chilling because it
ties into the title of your book, which is the
idea that there is a hit list of progressive journalists
and gallery would fit into that. And doesn't she at
some point say, oh, yeah, I should be on that list.
(26:27):
And she puts herself down exactly on the list as
number four, and she turns out to be number four
actually on murdered in this area.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Yeah, yeah, And so this is something that she would
joke about, like there clearly was a list, you know that,
like there are three people had been killed, and she
would joke about it. That's where the title comes from,
I am on the hit list. She would say that
as a joke with just this bravado. People would constantly
ask her, aren't you worried? Aren't you afraid? Shouldn't you
may take more caution? And she would just scoff at them,
(26:56):
and she was like, no one cares about me, No
one's coming after me giving me. At the same time,
she yeah, right, she made a list. She made her
own list of who she thought was likely to be killed,
and she put herself on it.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
So it's hard to know exactly what she was thinking there.
Was she trying to convince herself that she shouldn't be scared.
Did she just have mixed feelings about it?
Speaker 4 (27:20):
I don't know. I mean, I'm.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Sure it would have been just too paralyzing to go
to work every day and think I'm going to get
shot over this, And so in that kind of like
Gallows humor way that some journalists have, she joked about
it just as a way of getting past it.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
I guess the.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
CCTV camera in her yard was like the only thing
she would do that was like the single precaution that
she took. And then like, you know, like she could
have she was eligible. She was threatened enough that she
was actually eligible for around the clock police protection. Wow,
she could have gotten that, and she was like, hell, no,
I can't do journalism if I've followed around by a cop.
(27:58):
And she'd never even thought about it doing that.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
So tell me about the police investigation. She has killed.
The man hops back on the motorcycle, they take off.
The CCTV that is in her yard is fuzzy and
it doesn't seemingly at the beginning, look like it's going
to be very helpful. Number One, are we dealing with
the Bangalore police? Are they any good in this situation?
I guess start there. Are we talking about a good
(28:23):
police investigation from the beginning?
Speaker 2 (28:25):
I mean, they got a lot of problems. All the
Endian police have a lot of problems. There's just such
an incredible amount of corruption in the Indian police. They
also just don't have enough resources. Partly they're corrupt because
they literally can't afford to do investigations, you know, like
they have to sometimes like they have to ask for
(28:47):
money from a victim's family even just to do like
the driving around that is necessary to perform a real investigation.
You know, they often can't afford to feed prisoners in
their custody and they have to come up with solutions
to that, so it's really a mess. And then in
some cases the police themselves are compromised by some of
(29:10):
these political forces. Police have been known to participate in
religious riots and help coordinate their religious rights instead of
stopping them. So lots of different problems. The problem of
not having enough resources was not really a problem in
Gowery's case. It was such a high profile case. They
actually put together a special investigation team that had hundreds
(29:34):
of officers on it at first, hundreds of officers assigned
at once to this one case. Even so, expectations were
really low, partly given the track record of these three
previous murder cases, investigations not going anywhere, and just also
the fact that they just seem to make no progress.
The politicians who were in office at the time, like
(29:55):
the Home Minister of the state, talked really big, saying, oh, oh,
we're going to have a breakthrough immediately, we'd basically know
who did it. We're going to arrest people, it's right
around the corner. And then it didn't happen, and so
people start getting really cynical about it, and months passed,
and you know, I returned to India and people her
friends were mostly saying, this is going nowhere. There were
(30:18):
a lot of theories in the meanwhile, like in this
vacuum of information, there were so many different theories about
what happened to her. So obviously a lot of people
suspected the right wing, some faction of the right wing,
because that was who she had been railing against in
her paper predominantly, But there were a lot of other
things that people throughout. She had had a kind of
(30:41):
conflict with her brother. At one point there was a
rumor that he'd like waved a gun at her years ago,
so people were talking about her brother. People were like,
maybe it was a land dispute that went wrong. There
was no evidence that there was a land dispute, but
most conflicts in Bangalore seemed to come down to a
land dispute, so it was a reasonable guess. You know,
everyone who she'd ever insulted in her paper became a suspect.
(31:05):
That's a long list. Some of them weren't even political figures,
you know. And the right wing, being accused of complicity,
turned it around and said, we think it was the
left wing. So you know, I mentioned before these maoist
radicals who are kind of at war with the Indian government.
She'd written about them in her paper with some sympathy.
(31:28):
She was entirely opposed to their violence. She thought it
was completely stupid, but she'd wrote about their cause with
some sympathy in her paper, and she actually became part
of a project to try to help Naxalites who wanted
to leave the movement, to help them come out from
the underground and kind of rejoin mainstream society. It was
(31:50):
pretty successful, actually, she helped, you know, several local Naxalites
kind of get out and you know, take a different
path in life, and in collaboration with the government, crucially
with the local state government. And so the right wing
a lot of them were saying, oh, well, maybe some
actuletes were mad at her about that, so they shot her.
(32:11):
So all these different theories and no one knew what
was going on for I think it was about six
months before there were finally some arrests.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Okay, so tell me about that. How do they sift
through I mean they're looking through all of these different people,
and you said, nobody took credit and people were confused
because her paper was failing. But we know it's perception
whoever killed her thought she was worth murdering whatever she did.
You know, even if it's something to us that seems minor,
(32:40):
it is obviously serious enough for someone else to kill over.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
So what ultimately happens here?
Speaker 2 (32:47):
So I want to talk about that question of why
she was killed, because it was kind of confusing that
she would be targeted even though her paper was failing.
But kind of the assumption behind that premise is that
she was definitely targeted because of her paper, And I
think this is where, honestly, this is the thing that
became the most important part to me about this book
(33:09):
is that I felt like in studying Gowerie's life, I
learned so much about how to live a life, and
it made me think so much about how to live
a life, and like there was this understandable assumption when
she was murdered that she'd been murdered because of her journalists,
because she was a journalist, and because this is a
pattern that we recognize of journalists being silenced. Her paper
(33:31):
wasn't super successful in the end, but I came to
see it as I think her true talents were kind
of misidentified in the popular consciousness. She was actually a
truly extraordinary person, but her true talents were things that
often get dismissed or undervalued. In my mind, this is
(33:52):
really a book about how a society works, Like how
is what makes a society healthy and the people doing
thankless work to make a society healthy. And I really
think Gorie was one of those people, and that so
much of what makes a society healthy and good is
it's about community and relationships and friendships and care and
(34:17):
kind of filling in these gaps of things that government
can't or won't do, you know. And in addition to
everything that she's doing as a journalist, she had this
extraordinary network of friendship and community and making connections between communities.
She had like this talent for friendship and this talent
(34:38):
for making connections between disparate groups who otherwise would have
nothing to do with each other. And behind the scenes,
that was the true power of her work and of
her life. That her paper only showed a glimmer of it,
you know. But like when she died, the city of Bangalore,
like people came out in the streets, you know, by
the tens of thousands, and not just because of the
(35:00):
shock of it, and not because of her newspaper, but
because of her and because of who she meant to
them personally. And it was so surprising to so many
people who were close to her that she was close
to so many other people because she was low key
about it, you know, but she kind of filled this
role in her community that it's undervalued. It's the kind
(35:22):
of stuff that's often dismissed as like women's work, this
kind of community building, relationship building stuff, but it's the
kind of thing where, like, once you lose it, and
especially once you lose it in a shocking, sudden, violent
way like this, it's a huge setback and you immediately see, oh,
there's this big golf here because this person is gone
(35:43):
and there's not obvious who's going to fill that gap.
This was so powerful me to realize that, like she
didn't win awards as a journalist, she wasn't you know,
she certainly wasn't making money as a journalist, and she
wasn't really famous as a journalist. But what she did
with her life, through her friendships and through her talent
(36:03):
for community had such power and value in meaning for
everyone who touched her. And it just became so powerful
and moving and influential for me to talk to all
these people who she meant so much to and realized like, oh,
this is how people talk about someone who really made
(36:26):
an impact on them, you know, even if they only
met her a few times.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
And she has so much exposure to so many people.
And then you go back to this police investigation, which
must have been overwhelming, and I'm sure that her sister
and her niece were devastated by all of this, and
I'm sure that the police were feeling a lot of
pressure from people in the press, you know, to solve
(36:50):
this case. How do they eventually round up? Are we
satisfied that they found the right people here? So the
first arrest.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Happened in the spring of twenty eighteen, and the guy
they arrested, he seemed like a pretty small player in
the conspiracy to kill Gary Lankash. He was the guy
who was caught because he was the sloppiest, you know.
And actually we found out later after they all was
said and done, that he was someone who really annoyed
and exasperated his co conspirators because he was sloppy and
(37:21):
not very helpful. And his nickname was jote Manja, which
means pot bellied Manja because he had a a paunch,
but he was the one who they caught. The police
intercepted a phone call where he was talking about Garrie's
murder and kind of his sloppiness led them to everyone else.
(37:41):
The organization that killed her as a whole was very
disciplined and very careful and had a lot of protocols.
But you know, I guess it just takes one week
link to start opening this stuff up, So I do
think they caught the right people. It was this really
secretive organization, a nameless group of co conspirators that deliberately
(38:04):
didn't give a name to their group in order to
make it harder for the police. But ultimately the police
charged eighteen people of conspiring together to kill her, seventeen
of whom were arrested. One is still on the run,
and most of them, especially the senior members of the group,
were associated with this kind of fringe religious group based
(38:29):
in Goa called Sanatan Sansta, and they have an ashram
in Goa. They have a guru who runs the group.
Sanatan Sansa themselves has never been directly charged or implicated
with these crimes, which I still honestly don't understand why
there is a lot in my eyes connecting these suspects
(38:52):
to Sanatan Sansta.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
But what's what's the motive? What do they think the
motive was.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Well, it's interesting, it's it aims like very specifically. They
were responding to one thing Gower said in one speech.
She gave a lot of speeches increasingly towards the end
of her life, she gave a lot of speeches as
she kind of increasingly became an activist more than a journalist.
And she gave a speech where she was speaking about
(39:21):
Hinduism in kind of a derisive way, and she said
something to the effect of, like, Hinduism is a religion
that has no mother and father, Like you know Islam,
you know where it comes from. Christianity, who knows where
it comes from. Hinduism has no mother and father, kind
of implying that it's like a bastard religion. I'm not
even sure what her point was there. It was kind
(39:41):
of a mean thing to say, honestly, and like, it's
interesting because she was an atheist and she was kind
of baffled by religion. She was also thought it was
beautiful in a lot of ways too, Like she celebrated
all the religious holidays. She loved celebrating them with her
you know, nieces and nephew to to kind of like
explain to them the traditions. So she was interested on
(40:05):
that level, kind of more on a cultural level, but
she worried a lot that religion just did more harm
than good, I think, and sometimes, you know, a lot
of her colleagues were also atheists, but sometimes it even
made them uncomfortable, like how derisively she could speak about
religion because they were just like I spoke to one
friend of hers who just was like, obviously, no one
should be harmed for saying anything at all, but like,
(40:29):
it did make me uncomfortable when she spoke like that,
because even if I don't believe in religion, religion is
really important to people and they need it and it
helps them. You know, I'll tell you what she said
in that speech. Hinduism has no mother and father. It's
you know, it's kind of mean. But people have said
incredibly harsher things in the past in India. I mean,
(40:53):
like I said, India is a place where lots of
people just are super forthright with their opinions, and there's
a long history of people saying incredibly insulting things about
each other's religious beliefs. But only recently has this sort
of thing resulted in people getting murdered.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
And I'm sure her being a woman has to play
into it too.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Absolutely, it's clear that women are far more targeted with
all this stuff, you know, with getting like attacked online,
with getting you name it. If you're a woman, especially
a woman journalist, you're going to be in for a
lot more of it.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
So what happens there are they they're all convicted at
this seventeen out of eighteen.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
No, in fact, the trial is still going on.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
Oh wow, Okay, so first arrests.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Happened almost seven years ago. It took four years after
that for the trial to start, more than four years,
even though almost all of them were arrested in the
twenty eighteen. Because the Indian justice system is just incredibly slow.
They just they don't have enough judges. There's so many
(41:58):
reasons why it's slow, but it's cases can take decades. Yeah, Like,
it's not unusual for a suspect of a crime to
sit in jail awaiting trial for longer than the maximum
sentence of the thing they're charged of.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
We're going on eight years right now from when she
was murdered.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Right exactly, we're almost eight years after the murder, So
the trial is still ongoing. Just as of like the
other day, all seventeen arrested men have been released on bail,
which is a really bad sign. Actually, it's usually a
sign in the Indian justice system that this case is
not going to go anywhere. I hope it's not the case.
(42:38):
But they're all free. And when these guys got out,
right wing groups have celebrated them openly, like they hold
parties for them and put flower garlands around their necks
and feed them sweets. That's the reception that they get
when they get out of jail.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Yeah, and you had said in your book that essentially
this seems like an awful omen about things to come.
Yeah in India, I mean, where you're just sort of
lionizing these people who are you know, creating political violence
against journalists and whomever, you know, and then they're celebrated
or or you know, even worse, they're let go.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
So I know your confidence is pretty low about that.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, and we'll see, you know, I hope I'm wrong.
I mean, Gowrie's longtime lawyer who's brilliant. He seems to
remain confident that the case, or at least hopeful that
the case will end in convictions, even despite all the problems,
the delays that everyone getting out on bail.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
We'll see.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
But you know, things are it's really tricky. You know,
things are getting worse and worse. There are so many
more political prisoners. People are restigous for transparently political reasons
and charged with terrorism. I mean, look, run Dottie Roy,
who is one of the most famous Indian novelists, has
a terrorism case against her, okay for something that she
(43:57):
said in a speech, like twelve years ago, something she
said in a speech, and she's got a terrorism charge
against her. So they're not even afraid to bring a
charge like that against one of the country's most prominent novelists,
you know. And then meanwhile, a lot of people who
are less famous are just sitting in jail as political prisoners,
sometimes dying in jail political prisoners. And the situation for
(44:21):
Muslims in general is just rapidly degenerating. Depends on the state.
Some regions are better than others. The places where the
BJP controls the state government are a lot worse, there
are states where like open programs of ethnic cleansing are
going on, where like Muslim doors are marked with paint
(44:41):
and Muslim families are being literally driven out of the
state by the dozens. So this is the kind of climate,
and yet we hardly ever hear about it. And even like,
I find that even Indians, even Indians who care about
this stuff, it's really easy not to know about it
or not to tune into it, partly because the press
has degenerated so much that it's hard to even find
coverage of some of this stuff.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
What is the message here by the end of this
you know, I mean you've talked about her life and
how it's been an inspiration for you. Yeah, and you know,
she poured so much of herself, for better or for worse,
on some of these stories that she worked on, and
then she has assassinated clearly and has become sort of
this symbol of what happens if you speak out too
(45:24):
much on the wrong thing, you know, in India. So
what do you think, Like, what was your big takeaway
here that you haven't already said from this story that
you walked away with.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
It's interesting, you know, I feel like everything you just
laid out there, you know, the stakes and the context.
So many of her friends and colleagues have just taken
very different lessons from it. You know, some have have become,
you know, understandably really scared about speaking out and have
backed away from speaking publicly about political things. Can't blame them,
(45:58):
you know, in this kind of climate where jail or
murder are possible outcomes, there literally was a hit list,
and a lot of people found their names on these lists.
You know that they were going to be next other people.
They've been emboldened by it. You know, other people have
started speaking out a lot more loudly than ever before.
(46:20):
You know that It's just like I think that maybe
they felt like enough is enough as a result. I mean,
it's easy for me, as an outsider sitting outside of
India to take whatever lesson I want. I've definitely found it.
I feel like in my life it's made me want
to be a lot more forthright about what I believe.
(46:42):
And I'm not someone who's honestly comfortable with speaking publicly
about anything really, you know, like I've been talking here
for an hour, but it's actually not what comes naturally
to me, and I tend to be more private, and
I want to kind of keep my beliefs close, but
I don't know. It's hard to spend all this time
(47:04):
with the life of Gyrie Lunkash without taking the lesson
of just you got to call things as you see them.
You know, you should actually say allegedly, and you should
you should backcheck, but you should also call it like
you see it.
Speaker 4 (47:19):
And if you know.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
Something you'd be true and you believe it, then you
should make your convictions known. Sometimes you have to deal
with consequences from that. I mean, honestly, it's up in
the air whether I'm going to be allowed back in India.
I'm exactly the kind of writer who they've been leaving
out of India. I would really hate that. I have
in laws in India and I want to be back.
(47:41):
But it never made me feel like I shouldn't write
this book as a result, and part of that was
the inspiration of the subject of the book.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast tenfold more
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(48:25):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More
Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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