On the evening of September 5, 2017, barely two steps away from her residence in southwest Bangalore, journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead by two assassins on a motorbike who fired at her close-range before fleeing the scene. According to police reports, she was shot with the same gun, used back in 2015, to kill writer and activist MM Kalburgi, another ‘enemy of the nation’ in the eyes of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Lankesh was the editor of the ‘Gauri Lankesh Patrika’, a tabloid which earned the status of an ‘anti-establishment’ publication under the BJP-led government. Gauri’s body lying in a pool of blood, provided yet another instance that evening of how ‘the right to dissent is being threatened’ under the watch of an ideology responsible for the death of Gandhi. Meanwhile, as protesters held candlelight vigils to protest the killing, the BJP and its parent organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (R.S.S.), a powerful Hindu-nationalist paramilitary group took to social media celebrating the death of yet another fearless woman by justifying her murder as something she called upon herself by criticizing the ideology of the Sangh Parivar.
The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government ostensibly campaigned in favour of Vikas (Development) and provided a vision of a “New India” to which the country responded positively in the 2014 general elections. The silver-tongued Modi pitched every controversy against the establishment – corruption, demonetization, rising communalism – in terms of the relentless instrumentalization of nationalist sentiments, sharing a penchant with the extreme right’s view of the nation. In his campaign he deployed a populist strategy attempting to link the nativist ideology of his party to popular aspirations, fears and prejudices, including gendered folk and religious visualizations of a “New India” that subscribes to the BJP idea of divisive nationalism.
