The Gauri Lankesh Saga: Erasing the Line between Kannada Literature and Politics

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WHEN WE TRACE the roots of Gauri Lankesh’s diehard love for Naxalism and Naxals, the journey takes us back in time to the world of Kannada literature located in the mid-1960s onwards. Known widely as the Navya (New) movement (sic), it heralded the toxic phenomenon of dissolving the boundary between literature and politics. Here’s an eyewitness account of the era in the words of Dr. S L Bhyrappa who was one of the most high-profile victims of the packish hounding of the Navya hyenas:

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…I returned to Mysore in 1971…Back then, the web of the Navyas had spread everywhere. The magazine, “Sakshi,” published from Sagara [near Shimoga] under the banner of “Akshara Prakashana,” was their mouthpiece…students studying M.A. in the university…were aware of the fact that if they wanted their articles to be published in “Sakshi,” they had to praise the works of Gopala Krishna Adiga and U R Ananthamurthy…That magazine was the Church-like mouthpiece in which Gopala Krishna Adiga held monarchial sway over poetry and Ananthamurthy over prose without encroaching on each other’s territory…In this manner, with the financial muscle of the publishing house, the Adiga-Ananthamurthy duo exercised dictatorship over young and upcoming litterateurs. Folks like P. Lankesh who later broke away from them, earlier used to blow the trumpet of that magazine.

[…] …back then, the Lingayat and Vokkaliga communities were politically powerful…when they realized that their unique political identity would be subsumed by these two powerful communities, just as the Harijans began their own Ambedkar movement, they also gave birth to a new branch in Kannada literature named Dalita Sahitya (Dalit Literature) and broke out [of the Navyas]…a mindset developed among them which said that they needed to ignore the works of people from other Jatis. Separately addressing the Lingayat students at the Tiptur College, where Lingayats are powerful, P. Lankesh said, “None of you should buy the books of the Brahmin Bhyrappa. Don’t even read them. What will they contain? Only Brahmin problems!”

[Dr. S L Bhyrappa: Bhitti. Emphasis added. Translation by Sandeep Balakrishna]

The Legacy of Palyada Lankeshappa

Enter Palyada Lankeshappa. Popularly - or notoriously - known as P. Lankesh.

Gauri Lankesh’s father.

Incurably indoctrinated at a very early age by a noxious mixture of the worst of Communism and vicious Brahmin-hatred, generously sprinkled over with a garnishing of Lohiaism, Lankesh abandoned the respectable position of an English lecturer in the Bangalore Central College to start a poisonous Kannada weekly tabloid titled Lankesh Patrike.

WHILE Lankesh Patrike also holds the distinction of being the first ever Kannada tabloid, its real and wretched distinction is the fact that it singlehandedly inaugurated the precedent of dragging down Kannada journalism and mainstream writing down to the gutter. For twenty years, from 1980 to his death in 2000, this obnoxious rag relentlessly purveyed all-encompassing filth week after vulgar week, leaving a destructive trail of unprovoked vilification and casteist slander with Brahmin-bashing as its underlying premise and purpose.

Lankesh Patrike also perhaps for the first time obliterated the intrinsic value of restraint and linguistic decency in Kannada journalism, giving such headlines as “The Principal of X College is an Ass.” And that’s the most decent headline I’m quoting.

Sure enough, all sorts of deplorables woke up to the potential in this virgin tabloid market that Lankesh had tapped into. By the mid-1990s, there was an explosion of tabloids on every street-corner — mainly in Bangalore — each competing with the other to plumb deeper into the sewer.

The obvious consequences followed.

Tabloids became synonymous with blackmail and extortion "journalism," a phenomenon which flourished with impunity and continues to this day although with severely diminished power. Corrupt bureaucrats and cops, planted stories to bring down colleagues and to defame politicians. Street rowdies revelled in reading about their exaggerated "exploits" of valour. Salacious calumny against cinema actresses became a perennial cash cow whose udders never dried up. Every societal evil, misdemeanour or crime was a goldmine for these gutter-miners.

Leading this pack was Lankesh’s former employee-cum-stooge-turned bete noire, Ravi Belagere, editor of Hai Bangalore. Belagere not only stole Lankesh’s thunder of peversity but undid his circulation and business almost overnight. There is always greater motivation, zeal, and ferocity in the race to the abyss. If Lankesh slandered someone as an ass, Ravi Belagere outdid him with headlines like X Actress has Laid an Egg Again or Y Actress is a Country Hen (Naati Koli).

But Ravi Belagere was merely one among the prolific, notorious and third-rated spawns of Lankesh’s degenerate legacy. Actor and anarchist Prakash Rai (Prakash Raj) is another. Small wonder that he turned up at Gauri Lankesh’s funeral proclaiming, “not just Gauri, but all of us are Lankesh’s children,” and that Lankesh’s writings were “therapeutic.” Other notables directly or obliquely include the theatre director and actor Prakash Belawadi, a multi-forked, seasonal eminence who, depending on the wind, flirts with the BJP, gets unfriended by Gauri Lankesh on Facebook, and also simultaneously hates the RSS and related Hindu organizations.

This rather detailed backdrop is essential to understand and rend apart the veil of the cacophonic discourse aimed at awarding martyrdom to Gauri Lankesh.

Gauri Lankesh Usurps Lankesh Patrike

Gauri Lankesh took over Lankesh Patrike after her father’s death in 2000 at a time when it had irreversibly declined in both circulation and revenue thanks largely to Hai Bangalore. The other reason for its collapse was Lankesh’s unceasing travel to attend various defamation suits filed against him across the length and breadth of Karnataka. It ruined his health irreparably and eventually killed him.

Cover Page of Gauri Lankesh Patrike sporting a vulgar headline

WHEN GAURI LANKESH took over the tabloid, she not only retained its anti-Brahmin bile, but radically transformed it into a monster spewing extreme Naxal ideology and unhinged hatred against anything remotely Hindu.

Clashes erupted almost immediately when in 2001, a quarrel surfaced between her and her brother Indrajit Lankesh over the paper’s extreme ideology. Indrajit handled the business side and was its proprietor and publisher.

But the precise nature, extent and intensity of these differences exploded in public when she published a report endorsing and sympathising with a Naxal attack against policemen in February 2005. Here’s how the tawdry saga unfolded:

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Gauri said differences between her and Indrajit have been brewing for the past five yearsMatters reached a head on Sunday when a report on the Naxal attack on policemen, approved by Gauri, was withdrawn by Indrajit. …On Monday, while Indrajit filed a police complaint about a missing computer, printer and scanner, Gauri filed a counter complaint alleging that her brother had threatened her with a revolver...

Indrajit eventually evicted her from the rag after which she launched her own unvarnished Maoist yellow paper, Gauri Lankesh Patrike. Just as the stink is its own evidence, one only needs to cursorily peruse the abundant corpus of her scrap to grasp the true nature of her ideology.

Which brings us to further questions: with a paltry circulation and without taking any advertisements, how exactly did she manage to run it week after noxious week? How did she fund her travel, her activism, her jungle capers with Maoist terrorists and prance around in the Far Left seminar circus shows? Indeed, this is exactly what the nationwide secular scavengers, now determined to bestow sainthood upon Gauri Lankesh, have tried to conceal. Their confidence that Gauri Lankesh's record will go unchallenged rests on the notion that the general public is either ignorant or won’t verify their spurious claims about her if they drumbeat it loudly and endlessly across platforms and in the media.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

What we need to examine next is the critical question of the aforementioned report in which she supported the 2005 Naxalite attack against policemen, which led to her ouster from Lankesh Patrike. The attack, yes, but more importantly, her interview with its mastermind, "Comrade" Saketh Rajan alias Saki alias Prem opens up an entirely different, but deadly chapter.