Dissent under attack

Gauri Lankesh's murder raises several troubling questions

The brutal murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh has yet again brought into sharp focus the issue of intolerance in Indian society. Lankesh, in her fifties, was the editor of the Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a Kannada weekly published in Bengaluru, and was known for taking on right-wing Hindu fundamentalists with her sharp and stinging pieces. She had been receiving threats and online abuse for a while now with her paper being labelled “anti-Establishment”, and she was seen as an anti-Hindu and Maoist sympathiser. While there is no clear evidence to suggest who killed her, it is being widely suspected that right-wing