Free speech is for losers!

My father had a question for me.  "You have a flair for writing.  Why don't you write for the paper here?"

I told him only one half of the truth.  "I am not familiar with the nuances of India's politics for me to write about issues there."  He was convinced.

I did not share with father the rest: I have given up on the old country.

It is not that I don't follow the news about the country where I was born and raised.  I do.  But  ...

No wonder the courts always require "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."  Half-truths don't tell the entire story.

As I commented even here, I deeply value free speech, which is increasingly a endangered species in India.  The latest victim for speaking freely was a female journalist, Gauri Lankesh.

Gauri Lankesh was the editor of a weekly tabloid published in Kannada, the main language of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She was murdered on the fifth of September at the gate of her house in Bangalore, shot in the head and chest at close range.

Back in my younger years, free speech was severely curtailed during the dark two years of Emergency rule under Indira Gandhi.  She threw journalists in jail, and heavily censored the publications that were critical of her. It seems like free speech is way more a risky proposition now in India!

From the moment she died, the press reported her death not as an individual event but as the fourth in a sequence of assassinations; to the names Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and M.M. Kalburgi, journalists now added Gauri Lankesh. Politically they were all left-leaning, strongly rationalist, hostile to Hindu orthodoxy, and convinced that right-wing majoritarianism was the mortal enemy of republican democracy. They were also public intellectuals who chose to write in their mother tongues: Dabholkar and Pansare wrote in Marathi, Kalburgi and Lankesh in Kannada. They spoke to a vernacular readership beyond the reach of the country’s English media, with its pan-Indian but paper-thin Anglophone audience. Each of them was shot dead by men on motorcycles with homemade pistols who got away. 

And these are no isolated cases.  They fit into an overall theme:

The intimidation or murder of inconvenient journalists is part of a much wider violent tendency. Since Narendra Modi became prime minister, India has seen a spate of targeted assaults on poor Muslims and Dalits, plebeian groups who deal in hides and skins and cattle and meat. Dalits dealing in cow hides have been systematically thrashed by vigilantes, encouraged by the present regime’s commitment to cow protection. Muslims have been dragged from their homes and beaten to death on the suspicion of having eaten beef. Muslims involved in the cattle trade have been bludgeoned to death on public highways as they begged for their lives, or strung up on trees and lynched.
The deaths of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, and Lankesh weren’t just murders; they were lynchings, no different from the killings carried out by cow vigilantes.

Shikha Dalmia, who is a libertarian-conservative Indian-American journalist, whom I have been reading for years, writes about Lankesh's assassination.

To say that Gauri, whom I met in journalism school in New Delhi 34 years ago, was a remarkable woman would be an understatement. There was just no one I knew that was packaged quite like her. She combined a gentle warmth, profound compassion, easy forgiveness with a steely, unwavering, moral conviction. She was also preternaturally humble and honest—a hero who didn't have the vanity to imagine being one.

From years of reading Dalmia, well, her high praise means high praise.  Dalmia does not bullshit.

She made mistakes and had her blind spots, to be sure. Unlike me, she had a strong socialist streak. She didn't condemn Naxalism—a militant Maoist movement in India that fights for lower castes and farmers against feudal, upper-caste landlords—as forcefully as she should have. She called for the "rehabilitation" of its members because she saw them as more misguided than dangerous—and also because, whatever their excesses, they paled in comparison with those of a violent state that without any due process killed real and alleged Naxals in fake "encounters" (confrontations), including one with our journalism school senior, Saket Rajan, whose death profoundly affected Gauri.

I will end this with Dalmia's line:

Gauri's assassination shows just how far India's once-proud liberal democracy has fallen.