A new book highlights inconsistencies in investigations of the murdered rationalists in Karnataka.
The Rationalist Murders is the work of a seasoned medical practitioner, Amit Thadani, and it raises some very, very disturbing questions. The most important point the book raises is that pro-Hindu organisations were falsely implicated in the murders of four rationalists, and the media, within seconds, launched a vicious trial as if there was no tomorrow.
If this is true then it is very scary.
Thadani is not making a casual statement like guests mostly do without proper research on prime time night shows on news channels in India. The physician is a real gadfly on the wall. He has gone deep investigating the murders of rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar, Communist leader Govind Pansare, Kannada writer Prof Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi and journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh.
I read with all seriousness what Thadani said: “As you are aware, there are serious inconsistencies and problems in the investigations of these murders—to the extent that the investigating agencies have been going out of their way to delay the trials of the accused.”
And then he added: “I have pored through tens of thousands of pages of chargesheets, newspaper articles and reports of various government agencies in this regard to bring light on this issue. It seems that in their eagerness to connect the four murders with each other, the agencies have ended up deeply undermining all four investigations.”
This is not all, the author claims every year in India many are arrested on false charges of killing of atheists and are labelled as murderers. And they are mostly members of pro-Hindu groups. So a false narrative is created and retained, argues the author.
So the million-dollar question is: Who creates the false narrative? There are many in this business, argues the author.
So let’s list those who were found dead.
- Dr Narendra Dabholkar (67), rationalist and anti-superstition activist, who was founder of Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (MANS), was shot dead on 20 June 2013, by two unidentified gunmen near Omkareshwar temple in Pune.
- Comrade Govind Pansare (82), a rationalist and leader of Communist Party of India (82) and his wife, Uma were attacked by two motor-cycle borne youths on 16 February 2015, near his home in Kolhapur, and he died four days later on 20 February 2015 at the Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai.
- Prof Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi (76), noted scholar and writer, had run-ins with right-wing Hindutva groups over the years, was shot dead on 30 August 2015, by unidentified gunman at the former’s residence in the Kalyan Nagar locality of Dharwad.
- Gauri Lankesh (55), journalist-turned-activist was shot dead outside her residence in Bengaluru on 5 September 2017. She worked as an editor in Lankesh Patrike, a Kannada weekly started by her father P. Lankesh, and ran her own weekly called Gauri Lankesh Patrike.
And in all these deaths, the pro-Hindu groups bore the total brunt of criticism as the media went on a hyperbole and blamed the pro-Hindu groups for silencing what they called as voices of modernity. Thousands happily went along with such a theory, the dice was set.
So let’s look into the realities. I will start with Lankesh because she was my classmate at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) that operated from the plush South Extension market cum residential complex in Delhi. She was known for her anti-Hindutva stance, she hated the BJP and RSS and it worked very well with her Marxist ideology. Lankesh had been a bitter critic of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Bellary brothers, blamed for large scale illegal mining across the state. In November 2016, she was sentenced to six months in jail after a defamation case was filed against her for a report against BJP leaders. Time and again, she would protest what she felt were divisive moves of the right wing; she had, among her supporters, the venerated actor Girish Karnad.
She was a Naxalite sympathiser and had close ties with many Naxal outfits. One of the hardcore Naxalite leaders, Saketh, was her classmate and killed in a police encounter. Lankesh grew further left, and increased her attacks on Hindu groups, also Brahmins. Such was her stance that she split with her brother Inderjit and started her version of the Lankesh Patrike that her father had started. She called it Gauri Lankesh Patrike. What is interesting is the fact that her brother, Indrajit, when questioned by the cops, came out as evasive, at best, during the interrogation. He admitted having a pistol which he had once used to threaten Lankesh but told the members of the SIT that he had patched up with his sister. Time and again, her tweets reflected her serious differences with the Naxalite organisations.
And then, on the night of 5 September 2017, she was shot dead by two unidentified people on a motorcycle. As the news of the murder spread, Left-leaning organisations started organising protest rallies across India, turning her as a symbol of intolerance. Her murder was quickly clubbed with the murders of Dabholkar, Kalburgi and Pansare who were also killed by motorcycle-borne killers.
I had reported extensively on Lankesh’s murder, I remember what had happened around that time. There were others in Bengaluru who were being interrogated by members of the SIT, among whom is Vikram Sampath, a senior official of Bengaluru Literature Festival. In an angry Facebook post, Sampath expressed his total surprise at the SIT’s “bizarre” move to record his statement.
“I had never met her even once or interacted with her and was among the first people to tweet from London in condemnation of her dastardly murder.
“The reason I was told left me confused—that I had once upon a time (way back in 2015!) opposed the Award Wapasi campaign, which then spiralled into the controversy around the Bangalore Literature Festival, eventually culminating in my resignation from the festival in order to save it. At that time, in December 2015, Gauri Lankesh had apparently written very critical article(s) about me in her Kannada tabloid and some English newspaper(s)—none of which I had either read, or even responded to as it did not seem important to me to react to every opinion in that charged atmosphere, with a counter.”
“But the entire incident left me with more questions—Is this how SITs proceed? Are there angles that are sought to be planted and then probed? Will the SIT now also be questioning everyone whom Gauri has been critical of—because as a fearless journalist she has been critical of several individuals, including the high and mighty? Given the way this SIT is headed, will it really reach its rightful and logical conclusion? Or go the way several others, especially in Karnataka where killers of writers, civil servants or police officials, have gone nowhere even after years of them being constituted?”
And now, almost six years later, see what is emerging out of the investigation, as narrated by the author. It is indeed very startling. The cops first said there were three people who came on motorcycles, then they said no only two came. The SIT said cartridges found at the site of the murder were fired from the same 7.65mm country-made pistols used for killing of Dabholkar and Pansare. How the SIT said it without having any of the weapons used in the murders to verify this contention remains a mystery, justifiably claims the author. And then, the SIT said none of the five arrested in the Lankesh murder case was the shooter as their physical description did not match that of the assassin seen on the footage. And as many as 18 people arrested in the case told the court that they were severely tortured by the SIT and forced to sign statements prepared by the SIT.
The Bangalore Mirror carried a detailed story highlighting how the accused were tortured by the SIT when in custody. Worse, Amol Kale, who the SIT said was the main accused, and belonged to Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, was not in touch with HJS for more than a decade when he was arrested. Before that, he was not even an office-bearer. So at whose interest the Karnataka SIT was operating, why innocent men were slapped with the draconian Karnataka Control of Organised Crime (KCOCA).
Says the author: “This smacks of a conspiracy. Even when the members of the Abid Pasha Gang (with links to PFI) who were proved guilty of killing Hindu leaders with hard evidence were not slapped with KCOCA but those 16 Hindu activists arrested in the Gauri Lankesh murder case who do not have any criminal background have been slapped with KCOCA.”
The author goes deep into each murder and highlights grave mistakes committed by the cops to fix people. And it has happened every time when the accused were members of Hindu organisations. Each time eye-witnesses were produced to implicate them, each time the killers were changed, the weapons were changed, the “forensic lab” reports of the weapons were different. How does this happen, and why, asks the author. He wonders why millions of rupees were spent by importing foreign systems to detect weapons. Is someone pushing some strange conspiracy theory to fix people close to Hindu outfits?
Thadani has worked hard on each case. Consider this one. In one case, he says the charge sheet said that the spare parts of the weapon were separated and thrown into the creek, while a search in the creek claimed to have recovered a complete pistol.
“This is not a joke, but all such conflicting incidents are in the charge sheet. In this regard, rulers had declared the people of Godseist ideology guilty even before the investigation. Due to this political interference, the police conducted a single-minded investigation. Instead of knowing the truth, some media also contributed to mislead the investigation by doing a ‘media trial’. This had a major impact on the investigation. Innocent people belonging to Hindu organisations have been tortured and kept in jail for many years,” he said.
This is a brilliant investigation. If India has heard one side of the coin, it must hear the other side as well.
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