Why Kill?

Manan Ahmed Asif considers Rollo Romig’s “I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India.”

By Manan Ahmed AsifDecember 28, 2024

• Politics

• Biography & Autobiography

THE SETUP FOR Rollo Romig’s new book I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, which traces the last 10 years of India’s national history, goes like this: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Narendra Modi, comes to power on an anti-Muslim, anti-secular, Hindu-nationalist agenda. What follows next is the remaking of a nation, not only from the top down but also from the bottom up. First, in January 2016, a unique identifier and biometric system called the Aadhar (“foundation”) program suddenly upends citizenship status across India’s billion-plus inhabitants. Then, in November 2016, the state withdraws the commonly used ₹500 and ₹1000 banknotes from circulation with immediate effect. The first act results in the total reorganization of the massive welfare state in a system of classification of personal identity where databases can be easily manipulated by the reigning political party. The second, enacted ostensibly to combat “black money” or “corruption,” results in the invalidation of privately held repositories of rainy-day funds for millions of people. The overhaul of money systematizes graft at the national level in the hands of billionaires (there were 109 billionaires in India in 2014, but now, in 2024, there are 334, with Mukesh Ambani in the top 10 worldwide since 2021).

The same 10 years see the privatization of massive industries, port cities, and utilities; agencies focused on human rights, free press, or the environment expelled or instructed to leave India; and major universities losing funding and BJP stalwarts being installed across university departments and bureaucracies. Dissident students, professors, and activists are jailed (most remain in jail without bail a decade later). Beyond institutions, India witnesses the spread or intensification of Hindu supremacy across all levels of society—visible most clearly in the rape, lynching, and killing of Muslim and Dalit men and women for the “crimes” of “cow slaughter” or “love jihad” (the latter refers to the racist idea that Muslim men manipulate, seduce, and traffic innocent Hindu women away from their religious fold). Widespread hatred and demonization become the everyday reality, not only in relation to the degradation and lynching of human beings, but also in the material world, through the erasure of language scripts (the Perso-Arabic-Urdu) and the desecration of built forms (mosques). Over these 10 years, Modi and the BJP have won three elections. While Romig’s subtitle labels it a “rise of autocracy,” this decade actually marks the establishment of authoritarianism under the guise of the “world’s largest democracy.”

Against this backdrop, Romig focuses on a “hit list” of assassinations: physician and activist Narendra Dabholkar in Pune in 2013, CPI(M) politician Govind Pansare in Mumbai in 2015, anti-caste Kannada language scholar M. M. Kalburgi in Dharwad in 2015, and journalist Gauri Lankesh in Bengaluru in 2017. Lankesh is the first-person subject of the book’s title. She was shot to death by three unknown men on a motorcycle as she was opening the gates of her home one evening early that September.

Who killed her? Romig asks. Was her killing linked to those other killings of a doctor, a professor, a public official? Was it prompted by her advocacy against the Hindu Right’s dominance? Her advocacy for a Maoist splinter group waging a long war against the state? Or her columns in support of declaring Lingayats (a particular community founded on anti-caste principles in the early medieval period) separate from the “Hindu” religion? Did any of these actions actually “matter”? Romig finds that none of those killed was of enough “national” significance to cause alarm to the ruling party, none possessed the resources or public opposition necessary to mobilize against the BJP at a national scale.

More starkly, none of Lankesh’s writings or actions seemed to rise to the level of opposition suggested by her murder. So, what gives?

The book is structured as an exploration of various theories—presented as a whodunit—that follows the author, a reporter, who slowly sorts through possibilities and agents of force amid local, regional, and national collectives. Romig, who speaks only English among the many languages of the region, conducts interviews, shadows politicians, and takes walks with historians, journalists, and activists. He assembles and tests various theories about whose hands pulled the trigger that night. Eventually, he focuses on a group called Sanatan Sanstha (established in 1999), which proselytizes a muscular Hinduism and a claim for Hindu supremacy. Why might they have wanted to kill Lankesh? Vibes (the trail and the trial have run cold). Along the way, Romig takes several tangential journeys of varying levels of relevance: the story of Christian apostle “doubting” Thomas’s maybe-apocryphal mission to India, the history of a new fast-food franchise from South India (and its murderous scion), a dazzling description of Bengaluru’s astonishing book district. These strands deepen the reader’s sense of the place, and of gods and killers in South India.

Romig writes lucidly and with a certain amount of compassion for Lankesh and for India—or, rather, an idea of an India that could explain why these individuals, specifically Lankesh, became killable subjects. Killing a woman is commonplace and often unremarkable in a country with pervasive and endemic violence against women (data from 2022 registers 66.4 cases per 100,000 people, understood as a grossly underreported crime). India also experiences a high incidence of gender-based violence-as-spectacle, including, recently, the rape and murder of a 31-year-old female doctor in Kolkata in August 2024. Romig’s focus on Lankesh’s killing is written with an eye toward the question of political executions and is meant to draw our attention to a bigger story than just the life of Lankesh: in India, less attention is paid to the everyday reality of the unceasing deaths of women—victims ignored because they are women. I Am on the Hit List probes the capacity of the state and state-adjacent actors—working on behalf of a virulent ideology—to commit murder. Thus, Romig asks us to think about India as a whole, even as the book revolves around the political worlds surrounding Gauri Lankesh.

Romig can find no trail of blood leading directly from Lankesh to Modi, the kind we have, say, from journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder to Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. Perhaps such evidence does not exist, but most importantly, it does not need to exist for one to understand the events that unfolded. Lankesh, editor and publisher of her eponymous Bengaluru-based, Kannada-language weekly tabloid Gauri Lankesh Patrike, spoke and wrote about wide-ranging issues. Some of her pieces were critical of local or regional politicians, some sided with other purveyors of violent dissent (such as the Naxalites, a Maoist insurgency group), and some confronted caste hierarchies or those who demonized Muslims. Romig presents Lankesh as an individual who may have agitated many (even those close to her) with her writing and her no-holds-barred attitude.

What comes through clearly in I Am on the Hit List is that Lankesh’s murder (and by extension the other assassinations) made an example of her in her death. While she may be romanticized as a “martyr” by some, in actuality her killing very effectively silenced dissent in its aftermath. It mattered little whether she was prominent enough before her murder, or whether she believed in any of the myriad causes she addressed in her publication. The emphasis in Romig’s telling was not on the life and death of Gauri Lankesh but on the hand that pulled the trigger.

Lankesh lived a big life, however, and much of her practices of dissent were deeply gendered. “We actually didn’t realize the space she filled,” one activist tells Romig, marveling at the diversity of causes for which Lankesh had advocated before her assassination. “Now we can see that no one is ready to fill that space.” Romig explains how many of Lankesh’s friends marveled at her capacity to bring people together, cook large dinners, laugh, smoke, and talk into the night.

He does not see these acts of collective world-making as “political.” But I do.

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) posits that once a sovereign is created, even those who dissent have no choice but to submit or be deemed killable: “whether he be of the congregation, or not; and whether his consent be asked, or not, he must either submit to their decrees or be left in the condition of warre he was in before; wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever.” More pointedly, Hobbes theorizes that those who dissent should be a “declared enemy,” and thus “may lawfully be made to suffer whatsoever the Representative will.” Hence, those who dissent in an authoritarian regime are killable subjects as per the logic of their own intent, which justified their suffering. But who executes that “lawful” suffering? Who is it that “kills” people who dissent in a “democracy”?

The United States, for instance, has long claimed itself to be more Lockean than Hobbesian, but that is contestable. In “To Be Baptized,” from No Name in the Street (1972), James Baldwin reflects on a series of assassinations between 1963 and 1969—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton—that came from a place of state “terror,” acted out by a “tyranny” that could only defend its own power “by thugs and mediocrities—and seas of blood.” Baldwin does not point a finger at “lone gunmen” or “white police” for his reading of those assassinations. Remembering the assassination of Malcolm X, Baldwin argues that “whatever hand pulled the trigger did not buy the bullet.”

Correctly, Baldwin reveals the tyranny—white supremacy—that kills: a Leviathan that has created killable subjects from among those who dissented. We might note a particular echo here with President Barack Obama’s drone killing program, as revealed to the public in 2012. As reported then, it operated entirely through redefining the category “military-age males” to “enemy combatants,” and thus rendering them lawfully “killable,” even if they were unidentified, children, or women. Thus, the “Terror Tuesday” briefings for Obama made no distinction between civilians and terrorists, since the mere existence of people in so-called enemy territory in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia made them “lawfully” killable. In these disparate frameworks, from Hobbes’s lawful killing through Baldwin’s devastating enforcers of thugs and mediocrities to Obama’s infinitely expandable idea of the enemy combatant, the distinction between “state” and “nonstate” hinders more than it helps. When it comes to the matter of who killed Gauri Lankesh (“why kill?”) there are few questions worthy of asking, and one definitive answer: because we can.

In the case of Gauri Lankesh, there was no defiant act of opposition. Hers was a life of confrontation and revelation built through her deliberate effort to create collectivities founded in dissent. In this way, I Am on the Hit List made me miss Sabeen Mahmud—a friend who was assassinated in Karachi, Pakistan, in April 2015 in much the same way Lankesh was killed. Mahmud was on her way home at night, in a car with her mother, when assassins shot her five times from a motorcycle. She, too, had built expansive physical and social spaces for dissent, and for joy and companionship in collective opposition. Mahmud’s T2F (a.k.a. The Second Floor), is the stuff of legends, a gathering place for events, assemblies, poetry readings, and food that she managed and ran in Karachi. Mahmud, like Lankesh, is said to have been murdered by the state. Sabeen—I must say her name—had that extraordinary and rare ability to connect and bring people together across differences. At the time of her assassination, the authoritarian state in Pakistan was reacting to the many spaces she made possible for discussions that were understood as “security threats.” To kill dissent requires not only the elimination of journalists and intellectuals but also the organizers who make life and future thinking possible, like Sabeen.

Gauri Lankesh and Sabeen Mahmud—they made community. To cook, to laugh, to gather, to be given a place to debate but also to breathe and dance; these are the gendered dimensions of what it means to create and sustain space for dissent in the subcontinent. The work of these women as journalists, as thinkers, and as organizers was compounded in their labor as providers of “hospitality.” For Lankesh, it was both the physical office building of her paper and her own home, where food, music, and joy brought people together. Lankesh and Mahmud, or how we speak of them, as Gauri and Sabeen, were intellectuals, writers, and conveners who tirelessly offered critiques of the present to envision a future that was more just. They did so through their loving: of life, of writing, of gathering. Their labor brought about political and social coalitions that made them particularly dangerous to majoritarian states and actors alike who insist that exclusionary violence and militant acts are the only sanctioned modes of creating national community. The dissent of these women was the very act of creating intimate spaces that imagined a different world. And in just a matter of seconds, with gunshots in the dark, those worlds have been lost.

Romig gives hints of capturing this dimension in his discussion of Amulya Leona Noronha—a 19-year-old woman he had hired to serve as a translator. At a protest rally against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2020, she shouted “Pakistan Zindabad” (“Long Live Pakistan”) into the microphone (she said “Hindustan Zindabad” right after). As she was imprisoned in Bengaluru under sedition charges, she revealed to Romig her efforts on WhatsApp, Facebook, and even Tinder to garner support against the legislation that would make a vast swathe of Muslims in India noncitizens, and thus deportable. She did this linking, writing, thinking, and supporting on her own, without a party or an organization behind her. In prison, she told Romig, “I listened to so many beautiful-painful stories of people […] those we don’t know even exist.” Romig writes that “her fellow inmates taught her to read and write in Malayalam and Tamil and how to knit and embroider.” She made community inside a jail.