Opinion must be free

Opinion must be free

Make sure killers of Gauri Lankesh and MM Kalburgi are caught and punished.

On September 5 last year, journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead just outside her home in Bengaluru. The assailant had come on a motorbike, fired, and then fled the scene. This Monday Karnataka police’s special investigation team (SIT) finally arrested a Marathi-speaking suspect in Maharashtra. Links have been reported between Lankesh’s murder and the killing of MM Kalburgi in Karnataka as well as of Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar in Maharashtra. Karnataka CID is probing the Kalburgi case, CBI the Dabholkar case and a Maharashtra SIT the Pansare case. But unravelling the web of linkages to build up evidence for a successful prosecution needs cooperation and coordination across state and agency borders.

Dabholkar was killed in 2013, Pansare and Kalburgi in 2015, and Lankesh in 2017. The symbolic imperative of prosecuting these crimes successfully cannot be overstated. If journalists and intellectuals are felled by bullets and afterwards justice is not served, it seriously undermines freedom of opinion in the country and India’s fair name as a democracy gets tarnished. Moreover it is the basic function of any state, before all others, to uphold rule of law. No government worth the name can stand by as a group goes around systematically murdering its citizens.

Opposing political dispensations are ruling Karnataka and Maharashtra but this must not influence the investigations in any way. Any connections between these assassinations must be brought to light. Already forensic examination has shown that the bullets in both the Lankesh and Kalburgi cases were fired from the same 7.65 mm pistol. Yet the Kalburgi case had reportedly gone cold until it was reanimated by the Lankesh investigation. The danger that these four deaths will go unpunished is real. Only rigorous, independent and properly coordinated investigations can deliver justice.