It’s not a total mystery who killed Gauri Lankesh, a hard-charging local journalist and activist in the South Indian city of Bangalore who was assassinated in 2017.
Lankesh, the daughter of a famous Indian writer and publisher, was an aggressive critic of India’s right-wing religious groups, which have grown in power, prominence and violence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party.
While a few alternate theories are proffered about her death, I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India is not really a whodunit. Instead, it’s an obituary of a complicated woman and a portrait of a country’s descent into chaos, hatred and lawlessness. (Don’t worry: You still find out whodunit.)
The assassinated journalist’s life is both inspiring and perplexing, as her understated career in niche local tabloids blossoms into martyrdom and legend upon her death. Lankesh was fearless—some argued reckless—in her opposition to government corruption, creeping religious fervor and the subjugation of women and minority groups. She fought with her dear friends in the pages of her newspaper, and her antagonism of powerful forces had those same friends and family worrying for her safety. And for good reason. It’s a story of complex family relationships, both within the Lankesh family specifically and Indian civil society more generally.
As the story of Lankesh’s life and death unfolds, Rollo Romig, an American journalist with marital ties to Bangalore, sends the reader on several tangential journeys of varying levels of relevance: the story of Christian apostle “doubting” Thomas’ maybe-apocryphal mission to India, the history of the restaurant industry in India, a dazzling description of Bangalore’s astonishing book district. But the author’s reporting about the case has clearly been relentless; he traveled multiple times to the region and interviewed countless figures with connections to Lankesh, modern Indian politics and the case itself.
The complex ethnopolitics of the region and the country offer a disturbing but vivid backdrop for the murder. India’s retreat from pluralism and growing embrace of bigotry and oppression mean that Lankesh’s story is just one of untold many of murder, political violence and religious strife in a desperate country.
