KCOCA

Remembering Gauri Lankesh: A Hope, a Possibility, a Lesson

Though her assassins and their backers succeeded in killing her, they have failed to silence her.

Today, September 5, 2022, marks five years since Gauri Lankesh’s assassination.

She was not just a journalist but an empathetic human being and committed human right activist, and her gruesome murder stirred the conscience of civil society. Spontaneous demonstrations erupted not only in Bangalore, where she was killed, but all over the state, country, and different parts of the world like the US, Australia, Russia, Canada, France, England and so on.

On the day of her funeral, September 6, 2017, several thousands rushed to the city from every nook and corner of Karnataka as well as neighbouring states. A week later, on September 12, in an unprecedented and huge gathering, tens of thousands of people from every walk of life participated in a memorial, along with luminaries from every field.

In 2018, the reputed international body for press freedom, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), honoured Lankesh with a stele in the French city of Bayeux in recognition for her service to journalism. Last year, the city of Burnaby in Canada decided to officially observe ‘Gauri Lankesh day’ on September 5 every year.

In different parts of the world, many such heartwarming tributes to Lankesh have been pouring in.

Also read: A Year After Gauri Lankesh’s Killing, It’s Important To Remember Who Targeted Her

The case

The spontaneous outrage against Lankesh’s murder compelled the state of Karnataka – then run by the Congress under Siddaramaiah, who held Lankesh in high esteem – to constitute a special investigation team (SIT) to catch the culprits.

The SIT did a meticulous job. Seventeen of the 18 suspects were arrested and have been in judicial custody since. They include mastermind Amola Kale, the shooter Parushuram Wagmore and others.

The investigation also revealed that the same Hindutva gang was responsible for the assassinations of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar and Communist Party of India (CPI) leader Govind Pansare in Maharashtra and academic M.M. Kalburgi in Karnataka.

The arrests in the Lankesh case dismantled the gang’s plans of assassinating a number of other famous rationalists and progressive individuals. The investigation also unravelled the culprits’ indirect connections to the right-wing extremist organisation, Sanatan Sanstha.

Even though the chargesheet in the case was filed by the SIT back in November, 2018, the trial only began in June this year and few witness have so far been produced and examined. The prosecution has more than 300 witness and around a thousand pieces of evidence to be produced for the trial. The demand to constitute an exclusive fast-track court has not been heeded by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government now in power.

Nevertheless, the Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act (KCOCA) Court in Bengaluru has allotted the second week of each month from August 2022 onwards for the trial.

Also read: Why We Should Remember Gauri Lankesh

Meanwhile, the sessions judge who took the initiative has been elevated to the high court and the trial for the month of September will resume on the very day of Lankesh’s assassination, before a new judge. Since the accused have been booked under the stringent KCOCA, along with relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), bail has been regularly rejected by the courts.

Lankesh’s message is her moral courage

Lankesh, a committed democrat and human rights activist, would have opposed the denial of bail to her assassins – despite the chargesheet having been filed – on the principle of justice. She used to engage even her ideological adversaries warmly and compassionately on social media.

In fact, her last tweets and Facebook posts were an appeal to the youth of the oppressed sections to understand the Brahminical and corporate systems as their enemies and a humble appeal to progressive organisations to come together to fight the common enemy, leaving their differences to be sorted out later.

Even in her lifetime, her weekly newspaper served as a platform for the views of the marginalised, while her regular columns and editorials exposed the policies and designs of Brahminical Hindutva and the corporate forces backing them. The complexity of an unfolding situation could perplex her and she often took stands which she later realised were improper. She would apologise and correct herself with great ease and simplicity.

She hardly had much of a personal life. Except for a weekly visit to meet her sister, mother and niece, the rest of her time was spent with movements, agitations or seminars organised by different organisations in different parts of the state. Another part of her ‘leisure’ time was spent taking on officialdom for one people’s cause or another.

While other journals and magazines made money by being in the good books of the government and corporate sector, her magazine was perpetually making losses since she ran it without advertisements and without favouring anyone in power – a tradition she inherited from her father.

Though the larger world came to know about Gauri only after (and because of) her gruesome assassination, her transformation – from an urban, middle-class, cosmopolitan feminist sympathising with the other half, in an abstract sense, to a deeply empathetic, involved activist-journalist with death defying courage – is what made her life and work especially interesting and inspiring.

Also read: Gauri Lankesh: The Life Before Death

It is said that the real mettle of an individual, or an organisation, or a nation comes out in times of crisis. The choices made in these times define the persona of an individual or nation. History – and the present – is replete with examples of individuals and movements resorting to compromises, opportunism, betrayals and U-turns by bowing in the face of crisis. But Lankesh always faced her crises head-on, without bending an inch on her principles and beliefs.

She had to sacrifice her comforts and personal passions to sustain herself on the path she chose. Even when the police conspired to throw her out of her own institution because of her uncompromising fight against the government – against its policies of evicting and killing Adivasis in the name of ‘encounters’ with Maoists – and even when she had the option of a lucrative career in English journalism, she made the bold and principled choice to start a new Kannada publication with the values she cherished; with more fervour and rage.

The crisis of opposition

According to news reports in 2021 alone, more than six journalists were killed in India and more than 108 seriously attacked, along with institutional attacks on 13 media houses. Between 2017 and 2022, the five years since Lankesh’s assassination, 20 journalists were killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

These attacks are mostly happening in states where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is directly or indirectly in power, like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Kashmir. The lynchings, the unconstitutional incarceration of dissenters, and the like, are hardly ever discussed in the big media.

Also read: In Yogi’s UP, 48 Journalists Assaulted, 66 Booked, 12 Killed: Report

Today, the media has been tamed and people’s movements – despite occasional and temporary victories, like the recall of the farm bills or the agitation against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) – are unable to stop the Hindutva juggernaut. Opposition parties have failed to check the onward march of fascism. The search for real alternatives requires the courage to swim in uncharted waters, risking everything. That is where Gauri Lankesh becomes not just a memory, but a lesson.

Shivasundar is a columnist and activist in Karnataka.

Gauri Lankesh Murder: SC Sets Aside HC Order Quashing Organised Crime Charges

The high court had quashed the August 14, 2018, order of the police authority granting approval to invoke KCOCA for investigation against Mohan Nayak.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday, October 21, set aside the Karnataka high court order quashing the charge sheet against an accused in the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh for purported offences under provisions of the Karnataka Control of Organised Crimes Act (KCOCA).

A bench headed by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar allowed the pleas filed by the state and Gauri Lankesh’s sister Kavitha challenging the high court verdict on April 22 this year.

The high court had quashed the August 14, 2018, order of the police authority granting approval to invoke KCOCA for investigation against Mohan Nayak.

Lankesh was shot dead on the night of September 5, 2017, from close range near her house in Rajarajeshwari Nagar in Bengaluru.

While hearing arguments in the matter on September 21, the apex court had tentatively indicated that it is inclined to set aside a part of the high court order quashing the charge sheet.

As The Wire had reported then, the top court had noted that this was “a very serious order to be passed, quashing chargesheet without analysing the chargesheet.”

The top court had also questioned the counsel appearing for the state on the approval for invoking KCOCA being granted by the authority without there being any prior offence registered against the accused.

The state’s counsel had said the preliminary charge sheet was filed under provisions of the Indian Penal Code and the Arms Act. Thereafter, during investigation, the role of accused came to the notice of the investigation officer after which the approval was sought, he said.

During the arguments, the counsel appearing for the accused had said anyone can be said to be member of the syndicate if the arguments of the prosecution are to be accepted.

Kavitha Lankesh’s counsel had argued that the high court had erred in coming to the conclusion that KCOCA was not applicable against the accused. He referred to the role of the accused, as noted in the high court order, and said it was alleged he had taken a house on rent in the guise of running an acupressure clinic but it was meant to accommodate members of the syndicate.

In its order, the high court had said, “If the approval order itself is bad in law, the sanction order, the charge sheet and the approval order so far as the offences under the Act (KCOCA) against the petitioner (Nayak) have no legs to stand.”

(With PTI inputs)

Gauri Lankesh Murder | Inclined to Set Aside Part of HC Order Quashing Charge Sheet: SC

The journalist’s sister had challenged the order of Karnataka HC quashing the 2018, order of the Police Commissioner granting approval to invoke invoke Section 3 of KCOCA against accused Mohan Nayak.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday, September 21, indicated that it is inclined to set aside the last part of the high court’s impugned order quashing the charge sheet against Mohan Nayak, an accused in the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh, for offences under provisions of the Karnataka Control of Organised Crimes Act.

The apex court observed this while hearing pleas, including the one filed by the journalist’s sister Kavitha Lankesh. Kavitha had challenged the April 22, 2021, order of the high court quashing the August 14, 2018, order of the Police Commissioner granting approval to invoke invoke Section 3 of KCOCA for investigation against Nayak.

Lankesh was shot dead on the night of September 5, 2017, from a close range near her house in Rajarajeshwari Nagar in Bengaluru.

The bench reserved its order on the petitions.

A bench headed by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar told the lawyer appearing for the accused that what has been given to him is “bonus” as the Karnataka high court has also quashed the charge sheet against him for the alleged offences under the KCOCA.

“We could have understood that high court was to limit it to only that in prior approval your name should not have been included. We could have understood that argument and reasoning, but not quashing of the chargesheet against you,” the court said, according to LiveLaw.

The court expressed further disapproval of the high court by stressing that what was “challenged was 14th August 2018 order granting approval, the chargesheet wasn’t challenged.”

“We are tentatively indicating to you that we are inclined to quash the last part of the order. On prior approval, even if we uphold the finding given by the high court, the fact remains that nothing prevents the investigating agency to investigate on the factum of whether you are member of that syndicate or not and to present charge sheet after collating the material in that regard,” the bench, also comprising Justices Dinesh Maheshwari and C.T. Ravikumar, told the counsel appearing for Nayak.

Also read: On Third Death Anniversary, Gauri Lankesh’s Family Await Speedy Trial

Justice Khanwilkar noted that this was “a very serious order to be passed, quashing chargesheet without analysing the chargesheet.”

“Whether his role is mentioned in chargesheet or not HC has not analysed it!’ the judge remarked.

‘Syndicate’

Kavitha Lankesh’s counsel Huzefa Ahmadi argued on the consideration that Nayak be considered a part of a syndicate committing organised crime.

“The fact that all persons of that syndicate may or not be involved in earlier offence is completely immaterial,” the Ahmadi said.

He added that the high court has erred in coming to the conclusion that KCOCA was not applicable against Nayak. He referred to the role of the accused, as noted in the high court order, and said it is alleged that he had taken a house on rent in the guise of running an acupressure clinic but it was meant to accommodate the members of the syndicate.

“This charge sheet material comes after investigation. At that stage, without there being any offence registered against this particular person how can you level him as member of the organised crime syndicate unless there is some material which was placed before the authority to give prior approval,” the bench asked the state’s counsel.

The state’s counsel said the preliminary charge sheet was filed under the provisions of the Indian Penal Code and the Arms Act and during investigation, the role of accused came to light.

“To be a member of the organised crime syndicate, a person has to be part of continuing unlawful activity of the syndicate,” the bench said.

During the arguments, the counsel appearing for the accused said if the arguments of the prosecution are to be accepted then anyone can be said to be member of the syndicate.

When the counsel termed the law “draconian”, the bench said, “Once the validity of the Act has been upheld, how can you say ‘draconian’?”.

“These laws have their own purpose,” the bench said.

The bench said on the aspect of prior approval, the counsel for the accused may be right but to say that no offence has been registered in the past, so he cannot be proceeded at all, is not correct.

The bench, after hearing the submissions, asked the parties to file their written submissions within a week.

(With PTI inputs)

SC to Hear Gauri Lankesh’s Sister’s Plea Against HC Order Quashing Organised Crime Charges

The high court had quashed Karnataka Control of Organised Crimes Act charges against one of the accused, Mohan Nayak, earlier this year.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court will hear a final petition by Kavitha Lankesh, assassinated journalist Gauri Lankesh’s sister, challenging the Karnataka high court order quashing Karnataka Control of Organised Crimes Act (KCOCA) charges against one of the accused, Mohan Nayak. On Monday (August 16), the apex court listed the matter for hearing on September 8.

In June, a bench headed by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar had issued notice to the Karnataka government. At that time, the court had also said that the accused should not be granted bail until Kavitha’s plea was decided on. The accused’s lawyer had asked for an early hearing, saying his client had been in jail for three years now.

Gauri was shot dead outside her home in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017. In her petition saying the KCOCA charges should not be dropped, Kavitha has said that the special investigation team’s probe investigation clearly indicated that accused persons were involved in an “organised crime syndicate”, LiveLaw reported. The same syndicate, according to the SIT, was responsible for the murders of Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare.

The accused Nayak is said to be a close associate of Amol Kale and Rajesh Bangera, both of whom are key accused in the case. According to Kavitha’s petition, Nayak was found to have actively provided shelter to the key accused and was also involved in “continuous unlawful activity” as defined by KCOCA.

In April 2021, the Karnataka high court had quashed the Bengaluru Commissioner of Police’s report as well as the supplementary charge sheet in the case. Because of that, the KCOCA charges against Nayak were dropped.

“In the case on hand there was no registration of any case or filing of any charge sheet or taking of any cognisance even in individual capacity of the petitioner, much less as member of the organised crime syndicate or the commission of crime for and on behalf of the crime syndicate,” the high court had said then.

Kavitha’s plea, according to LiveLaw, says that the high court made a mistake by “not examining the scheme of Section 24 KCOCA which states that prior approval ought not to be granted by any officer below the rank of Additional Director General of Police which has been duly complied with in the present case”.

Kavitha also said that the high court “failed to appreciate the fact that the sanction order under Section 24(2) KCOCA was neither challenged nor assailed, and only order under Section 24(1)(a) had been challenged”, LiveLaw reported.

After Kavitha, the Karnataka police too approached the Supreme Court against the KCOCA charges being dropped.

The SIT looking into Gauri’s assassination has so far charged and arrested 17 people in the case, all linked to extremist right-wing Hindu groups.

After the high court dropped the KCOCA charges, Nayak approached the same court for bail. This plea was rejected in July, with the court saying that grounds on which the accused wanted bail were not applicable.

The Weaponisation of Sushant Singh Rajput’s Death

The case and its victims are a reminder of the ways patriarchy is alive and well, and always sharpening its blades for the next execution.

In a recent television interview, journalist P. Sainath rued the fact that the death by suicide of scores of farmers, driven to desperation by poverty and state failure, had failed to garner a fraction of the attention that Sushant Singh Rajput’s untimely death had received. A study of media engagement with the ‘SSR’ story found that the audience has consistently rewarded media houses and journalists alike for tweeting about the case and its aftermath. The nation, it seems, wants to know.

Or at least enough of it wants to know – or has been ‘programmed’ to want to know – to make it worth the while of TV channels relentlessly hammering away. For those confused, embarrassed, or enraged at the persistence of the story, the media is whipping up a red herring. Politicians are out to distract us with a murder mystery from what is now unarguably our biggest crisis in decades. There is little doubt now that the conspiracy is now illusory truth – it has been repeated sufficiently, with enough sources, detail, and flashing headlines that even those who once scoffed at it are convinced they have a favourite suspect. The question here is not what fraction of a sufficiently outraged minority is sufficient to claim the voice of the nation. The questions are – why is Rajput’s tragedy so captivating, and what ecosystem enables it.

First, the why. Sushant Singh Rajput was the quintessential genius outsider who makes it despite the odds. We love outsiders. Much like Ranchi boy M.S. Dhoni, who he played on screen, and of course India’s most celebrated outsider, Prime Minister Narendra Modi (who got Vivek Oberoi), Rajput represents the definitive non-elite man taking on an entrenched aristocracy. Unlike farmers, whose adversary was an ill-defined, apathetic state, these outsiders had antagonists whose vilification already had widespread purchase. A good story has a great villain. If the patterns of misinformation around COVID-19 are any indicator, we tired quickly of statistics and explanations and sought out villains – first the Chinese, then the Tablighis. Now enter the Bollywood cabal.

Also read: Backstory: Everything Wrong With the Media Is Reflected in the Sushant Singh Rajput Coverage

Second, it mattered that Rajput was a man. Several female actors have taken their own lives over the years, some explicitly calling out one or another person as responsible. Yet, almost every woman in the industry faces some form of victim blaming for the transgression of even being in the industry.

Indeed, the main casualties of the story have been women – his partner Rhea Chakraborty, slandered, hounded and jailed. Once the story devolved into allegations about drugs – the media has publicised four actors (all women) who ended up under the Narcotics Control Bureau’s scanner – Deepika Padukone, Sara Ali Khan, Shraddha Kapoor and Rakul Preet Singh. What may have made the scandalous ‘complicity’ of the women in Rajput’s tragedy more believable is that the two figures most known for their prosecutorial zeal in the scandal were also women – anchor Navika Kumar and actor Kangana Ranaut, frequently touting her own outsider status.

Third, we’ve been primed to salivate. Television sitcoms had already hooked us on to the slow burn of inconsequence with dramatic background music. We are set up for twists at the end of each show, prodding us each day to prepare for tomorrow’s epiphany. New characters are introduced with clockwork, and as with Bigg Boss, the most unwitting are nudged out. A look at a map of the dramatis personae through the case shows us that television channels have been assiduous about introducing new suspects, new angles. The headlines call out people by name, cast innuendo in the guise of investigation, dismantle reputations irreversibly as aspersions glue in alongside question marks on someone’s news site. Times Now and Republic, the two channels which most closely associated with the ‘case’, get far more social media engagement on Sushant Rajput than on other stories. The shriller of the two does way better.

Fourth, vested interests have learned to weaponise this. For a non-trivial group of faithful, the illusory truth, repeated enough, is fact. The inherent crassness of public life, when one’s primary face to the world is a Facebook profile or a WhatsApp image, is best compensated through righteous outrage. While social media as a space for venting gets a lot of our attention, its ability to make us engage with (or not challenge) dodgy content should concern us far more. The weaponisation is not in turning us all into trolls, but rather turning us into sleeper cells of ‘like’ machines.

Within the first month of Rajput’s death, BJP politicians started referring less and less to the case as suicide, and increasingly as murder. Television channels had more or less stopped talking about mental health, and moved to arrests and conspiracy. There were Rahul Gandhi jokes, and then talk about birds, specifically penguins. For those in the know, ‘penguin’ is a slur for Aditya Thackeray. There was a systematic social media campaign against the Maharashtra police, and by extension, its boss, the chief minister. The introduction of a new angle made Biharis and Purvanchalis the oppressed outsiders, and the Thackerays the nepotistic villains laying claim to a city, a state that they have no legitimacy for.

Also read: The ‘Danse Macabre’ Around Rhea Chakraborty Has Exposed Indian Society’s Inherent Misogyny

As research into online groups claiming to seek justice for Sushant Singh Rajput have shown, a heady mix of ultranationalism, casteism, distrust of Muslims, and misogyny are drivers of some of the online action that we have seen in recent months. The landscape of misinformation is enabled both by the bystander unwilling to get called an anti-national, and by those who partake in the ride. An invincible treadmill of positive reinforcement fuels you along as part of a righteous lynch mob progressing together towards the blood it smells.

We must never forget that whether we or those close to us will change how we behave to dodge the next purge is no longer a question. We have been in it for a while. The events that followed may tempt us to think that this offers a window into the ways that online culture has changed society and media in India. But the truth may be more chilling than that. While social media may have facilitated certain kinds of virality and the speed with which narratives have changed, the case and its victims are a reminder of the ways patriarchy is alive and well, and always sharpening its blades for the next execution.

Rhea Chakraborty was a prop for interviewers who knew fully well her doom had been scheduled. For the television channel, the next hourlong reiteration on COVID-19’s ongoing wrath is mostly reserved for days there is nothing else to say.

Nobody cares. We need victors, or we need villains. Until we don’t have footage of Subramaniam Swamy eating cow manure in warm milk to cure Covid, or an IPL game actually worth watching, let us turn to the gift that we know keeps giving. One man’s tragedy has helped us forget 2020 in small measures. Let us all stand for a minute in silence in his honour. Maybe on our balconies.

Joyojeet Pal (@joyopal) is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where his research focuses on on social media use in by political leaders.

Backstory: Everything Wrong With the Media Is Reflected in the Sushant Singh Rajput Coverage

A fortnightly column from The Wire’s public editor.

Film journalism as a genre was potentially a money spinner, which was why almost every major Indian media house at one time made sure to have a film magazine as part of its stable of publications. Some of the most discomfiting aspects of today’s news journalism, especially television news journalism, draw from formulae tried, tested and deployed by the cinema-centric publications of yesteryear.

Let me try and list them: hyper-personalisation; loud, sensationalism; rupturing the private-public separation with voyeuristic intent; the thrill of the chase to the extent that it becomes blood sport; the gossipy edge stained by deep shades of misogyny; the close nexus with powerful interests looking to influence content; the daily churning out of heroes and villains; the intense competition for circulation with rivals; the constant feeding of the insatiable appetite of readers for more; and, yes, the dressing up of fake content to make it appear authentic.

As a copy editor in my early days of journalism, I had occasion to prepare, for publication, the column of Devyani Chaubal, gossip queen extraordinaire and arguably India’s first journalist to adopt Hinglish as her lingua franca. Her column was a simmered down soup of the ingredients she picked up from the numerous “filmi” parties she attended indefatigably, combined of course with her unique capacity to use words intuitively in order to sting and to singe.

I couldn’t but recall Chaubal and the sturdy template of film journalism, while attempting to understand the coverage accorded to the Sushant Singh Rajput story. What began on June 14, 2020 as a tragic suicide ended two-and-a-half months later as a media “investigated” murder, leading to real arrests.

It was not the smiling visage of Rajput that held together this series “streamed” live, hour by hour, day after day, week after week, without a break, but the figure of Rhea Chakraborty, identified by Rajput’s family as the evil intriguer and who came to be modelled as the perfect vamp in the cinematic sense.

We have to be grateful to Tejinder Singh Sondhi, who bolted from the Republic TV stable recently, for fleshing out just what it is that news channels do. In an interview to Newslaundry, he confessed that his real job was not that of a journalist but of “hitman”. Chasing down the victim of the day with a blunt instrument – the microphone – was all in a day’s work and this may also include Bollywoodian “chase sequences”.

Also read: Backstory: How Facebook and BJP Ring-Fenced India

The arrest of Rhea Chakraborty at the end of that long hard pursuit proved cathartic for those who got addicted to it, going by the numerous celebratory tweets of self-congratulation.

This brings me to two important aspects of the SSR coverage that made it sui generis and which had nothing to do with the earlier template. First was the new ways in which social media instigated and amplified the case. Striking was the innumerable #SSRian groups, both Indian and international, that sprung up on WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, all demanding “justice for SSR”. Some of these groups coordinated their activities with offline media – posters sprang up, for instance, in Australia.

The second distinctive aspect was the pre-election frisson that was invested in the narrative. If Rajput was a son of Bihar; Rhea soon became Bengal’s very own. Sometimes, the same party took on nuanced identities. The BJP – the first to recruit the SSR aura by having the star’s face on its pre-election posters in Bihar – while pumping up the adrenalin on Rajput in that state, was far more calibrated on the issue in Maharashtra. Apart from a few exceptions, the media chose not to systematically expose this opportunism for the benefit of voters, choosing instead to adopt the same cynical strategy of location-specific narratives.

In many ways, everything that is wrong with Indian journalism is reflected in the SSR story. A great deal of valuable analyses of what such coverage means for our already debased journalism have emerged, both in The Wire and elsewhere. As the article, ‘Once There Was News. Now There Are Loud Anchors, Sold Out Editors and BJP’s IT Cell’ (September 6) notes,

“The waters are so muddied by alternative facts, untruths, fake news that only the loudest can be heard, and who can possibly be louder than the likes of sold out anchors, self-seeking editors and the BJP’s IT cell?”

The underlying misogyny has also been called out (‘The ‘Danse Macabre’ Around Rhea Chakraborty Has Exposed Indian Society’s Inherent Misogyny’, September 10) as indeed the return with a vengeance to the shrieking coverage that was accorded to the Arushi Talwar case (‘Arushi Talwar To Rhea Chakraborty: A Tale of Two Media Trials and Zero Lessons Learnt’, September 1). There was also a recalling of a suicide from the past that was allowed to sink into oblivion in contrast to the necrophiliac detailing of the present one (‘Media and Suicide: Sushant Singh Rajput and Kalikho Pul, Four Years and Two Worlds Apart’, September 10).

Several commentators have pointed to the irony that this tin drum is being beaten at a time when innumerable challenges face India from the pandemic, to the sinking economy and troubled borders (‘Editorial: Time to Show Media Bullies Their Place’, August 29). There was, however, an unmistakable sense of despair underlying these commentaries, provoked by the realisation that nothing really can done unless, as The Wire editorial points out, viewers protest against it by using their remotes wisely and in sufficiently large numbers. The question is will the “new news consumer”, fed for years on a steady diet of fake journalism and whose media habits have been re-fashioned by the globalised market place, even have the agency to switch off?

Also read: Backstory: Ram Mandir and Kashmir – A Tale of Two Forms of Media Control

Remembering Gauri, with feeling

Three years after her death on September 5, 2017, the many cultural programmes held to remember Gauri Lankesh testified to her extraordinary hold on the imagination of not just her compeers but a broad swathe of civil society. The ‘Hum Agar Utthe Nahi Toh’ (If We Do Not Rise) campaign, which saw women’s groups, LGBTQIA+ communities and human rights organisations across the country join in a show of solidarity with Gauri and in defence of the constitution, was just one of this kind.

The tragedy is that the pursuit of justice in the case seems a long and hard process, and could see many reversals. As the writer of the piece, ‘On Third Death Anniversary, Gauri Lankesh’s Family Await Speedy Trial’ (September 3), points out, despite the fact that the SIT had gathered 456 witnesses and 1,056 pieces of damning evidence against 17 of the 18 arrested in the case, and despite the police having booked the accused under the special Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act (KCOCA), there has been very little progress. The reason for this is simple: a special designated court to handle the case has not been allocated by Karnataka’s BJP government. Procedural inertia? Lack of political will? Both?

The Bengaluru Town Hall on Gauri Lankesh’s birth anniversary, on January 29, 2018. Photo: By special arrangement

Look who’s writing the op-ed

Are journalists soon to be an extinct species? Media proprietors in India have exploited the COVID-19 crisis to fire over a thousand journalists in India, so we can well imagine the managements of the future eagerly adopting Artificial Intelligence technology to protect their bottom-lines. An op-ed carried in The Guardian was produced entirely by AI (‘A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?’, September 8). This is a leap from earlier prototypes of automated journalism, where stories like weather reports and stock markets forecasts were drummed up by feeding data into machines. An op-ed, in contrast, needs brain power, and as the creature that goes by the nomenclature GPT-3, who wrote the piece put it, “I know that my brain is not a ‘feeling brain.’ But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions.”

Where this creature stands on the political-ideological spectrum is of course the moot question.

Also read: What’s GPT-3, the Language Model Built by OpenAI, and What’s So Exciting About It?

Middle-class misogyny

Reader of The Wire, Urbee Bhowmik, writes: “I am in complete agreement with Panchali Ray (‘Of Media Trials and Witch Hunts: A Testimony of Survival’, September 8) regarding the heinous media and social trial that Rhea Chakraborty has had to go through. The matter is sub judice and I am not sure how this case will proceed, however, it is incomprehensible to me how she is being framed in this case. The various turns it has taken definitely points towards what Panchali Ray calls ‘middle-class misogyny’. Sushant Singh Rajput’s death was surely tragic, but going witch-hunting to find some form of solace and pulling distant threads to frame an apparently innocent person is absolutely unacceptable.

If stringent laws regarding sexual harassment have left men ‘afraid of approaching women’, I would say this situation has left women worried as to the unintended consequences of being close to a man, who dies by suicide later, without leaving any note, leaving the woman framed for being with him. Hope justice and good sense prevails!

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Distressed students in COVID 19 times

The media coordinator of the Maharashtra Students Union wrote in:

“Many days have passed since the Supreme Court’s verdict, but Maharashtra’s Minister of Higher and Technical Education, Shri Uday Samant, and the vice-chancellors of all 13 non-agricultural state public universities, seem unable to make concrete decisions on how the final year examinations will be conducted. This means that they do not have a Plan B. It also indicates how lightly they are taking education. As a result, it will be difficult for approximately 10 lakh final year students to secure their academic future in the state.

Among the recommendations made by the Maharashtra Students Union (MASU) are the following:

* The exams should be conducted online or in hybrid mode in which question papers can be sent via e-mail or WhatsApp and the students can solve them at home in the given modes.

* Examination syllabi should be taken into consideration up to the month of March, and study notes and question sets should be made available to the students by the principal or professors.

* Degree certificates should be distributed to the students by declaring the results of all the examinations by October 31.

* Special provisions should be made for students with disabilities so that they are not treated unequally. The examination system/modes should be the same for all the 13 non-agricultural public universities.”

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“We, the students of MNIT, Jaipur, have raised our voice over the unutilised components of the fees charged to us and have mailed the authorities several times. Alas our queries have fallen on deaf ears. There are protests raging in the NITs all over India on the same issue. We hope that The Wire will cover this as it has revamped journalism in India by covering important and genuine concerns.”

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Critiques of The Wire‘s coverage

This is an excerpt from a mail that Sudeshna Chowdhury sent in on the piece, ‘Pranab Mukherjee, Last of the Grand Bengali Politicians of India’ (August 31). She observes that the author, when writing about Pranab Mukherjee, identifies him as a Bengali, to which she poses the question: “But wasn’t he an Indian first?”

She goes on to say: “The writer’s bias towards the community comes out when she writes: ‘Today, on his passing, it can safely be said that the last of the stalwarts from Bengal to have commanded power in Delhi has departed.’ Is she an astrologer? How does she know/or not know that there will be no one after him from Bengal or any other region for that matter?”

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Koustubh Sinkar writes in on the article, ‘The Ship Recycling Industry Must Move Towards a Sustainable Future’ (August 3). “The first name that appears in the byline credit is that of Sara Costa, who is described as ‘an independent researcher working from Belgium’. This claim is false. She is NOT an independent researcher but a project officer who works for the industry lobby group, NGO Shipbreaking Platform. There is nothing wrong in an article being written by a lobbyist, but then they should not masquerade as ‘independent researchers’. I just hope that you shall make the necessary rectification in your description of Sara Costa in the article mentioned above. It would also be great if you printed the full name of Sara as it has been printed on her employers’ website here. This should remove any doubts in the readers’ mind about who Sara is.”

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A reader, Anand Raj, has a lot of anger to express on The Wire’s journalism: “Reading your editorials and news I just feel that you and your team are full of negativity.” He then goes on to launch a diatribe making ugly and unacceptable accusations which had to be edited out.

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Another critic, M.K. Shah, points out that The Wire carried “about a dozen articles on Dr. Kafeel Khan. But not a single one on the Palghar incident.” He wants to know why The Wire gives prominence to “one community alone”. Well, all I can say is that we have received dozens of letters from this gentleman on this one topic. Quite recently, he complained how The Wire presents “Hindus as oppressors and the Muslims as the oppressed.”

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Prasanth Nair writes: “A big virtual hug from millions of readers who look forward to reading your publication. We have changed as a nation since Modi swept the 2014 elections. There stand two parties (one favouring the ruling party who see themselves as ‘nationalist’ and the other which questions the governance of, and decisions taken by, the ruling party, and who are termed ‘anti-nationalist’). The Wire, and its readers, seem to belong to the second category. It must be hard to function independently, but your team’s work will inspire millions of fence-sitters like me. Please let us know if we can be of any help in continuing this journey. I am based out of India and cannot therefore contribute to The Wire financially.

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Naveen Tenyson sends his support: “I appreciate the high quality of journalism of The Wire and daresay that speaking truth to power is what powers it and distinguishes it from those media establishments who have chosen to be fawn and grovel before the powers that be. I hope you continue to strive to ferret out the truth in the years ahead.”

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