Gauri Lankesh was shot to death on 5 September 2017, sending shockwaves across the nation and sparking widespread protests. Even as the police unravels the plot behind her murder, the larger forces that killed Lankesh continue to grow.
In this personal-is-political narrative, senior journalist and Lankesh’s ex-husband Chidanand Rajghatta, in his book lliberal India: Gauri Lankesh and the Age of Unreason, narrates his life with Lankesh against the volatile backdrop of an “intolerant India.”
Here are some excerpts:
Chalo Delhi
Gauri and I had been married a little over a year when MJ Akbar asked me to join the Delhi bureau of The Telegraph, persuading me to give up the dual job of writing for both the newspaper and Sunday Magazine.
Both were well-regarded publications from the Ananda Bazar Group of Kolkata, which was known for giving its editors a free hand. Akbar appeared to have lost interest in Sunday by then and was considered close to the day’s (Rajiv Gandhi’s) establishment. We heard that the Delhi bureau of The Telegraph was teeming with prima donnas, and Akbar and his then bureau chief, Kewal Varma, had a hard time managing the likes of Tavleen Singh, Seema Mustafa, Louise Khurshid nee Fernandes and Rita Manchanda — all fine journalists but not exactly the best of friends — or so the scuttlebutt went. We were, so to say, baa-lambs from Bangalore.
The two of us were reluctant to move out of our Bangalore lair. We were happy, ‘well settled’ and comfortable in a familiar ecosystem. The idea of heading north to Delhi didn’t particularly appeal to me. Not exactly careerists, we saw journalism as a temporary profession before we ventured into the more writerly pursuits that many of our friends and mentors had taken to.
Delhi was also a drab city those days, and the weather was insufferable for someone from salubrious Bangalore. It was either too cold or too hot in an era when there was no central heating or cooling and the middle class could afford only basic heaters and coolers. But Gauri had spent a year there at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) and was a little more open to moving. It might be good for your career, let’s give it a couple of years and see, she ventured. Akbar too kept pressing. We relented under two conditions: ABP would cover the actual cost of our house rent in Delhi (newspapers those days typically gave only 10 percent of basic income as house rent) and Akbar would help us with Gauri’s transfer to The Times of India, Delhi. We must have been likeable; they met both conditions.
Life in Lutyen’s Delhi
We rented a modest barsati in New Delhi’s Defence Colony (at Rs 2,000 a month). It would be our home for the next four years. Gauri fitted in uneasily in her new office, where Dileep Padgaonkar was the editor, working initially for its magazine supplements Friday Times and Saturday Times before moving to the general desk. Across town in the ABP stable, Akbar had by now abandoned Sunday Magazine for The Telegraph and what we realised later was a stab at politics. Assigned to cover the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), the Lok Sabha and the Ministry of External Affairs, my innocence was put to the test in Lutyens’ Delhi.
Meanwhile, at home, life was bohemian and boisterous, full of love and laughter (and sermons and soda water the day after, to paraphrase Lord Byron). We had a wide circle of friends, and we entertained as best as our modest circumstances and digs would allow. Many of The Times of India editors of the day — Gauri’s colleagues — would frequent our roof-top parties although we were many years their junior. A young Manoj Mitta was a neighbour, the brothers Tejpal lived nearby and were dear friends, and we had frequent visitors from Bangalore.
Life at Home
The stint in Delhi brought us out of our comfort zone and introduced us to national-level politics. At home, Gauri insisted that I share the housework equally, including cooking. If she was on a night shift, I was to make dinner. I was a typical Indian male at this time, not brought up to participate in household work, and her methods to change me were gently persuasive. She pointed out how an uncle of mine, who visited us at our Delhi home, not only cleaned up after himself and straightened up our home in the time we were in office, he also had dinner ready when we returned from work on each of the four days he was with us.
She became a big fan of this uncle, my dad’s elder brother, RN Nanjundappa, a retired principal of the SJ Polytechnic in Bangalore — also because he was an atheist, a rarity on my side of the family. My dad was of similar temperament (he was my mother’s primary caregiver in her final days, when he himself was ninety two), and Gauri loved them both. She also took great interest in the life and struggles of our housekeeper Jameela, asking about her life in the jhuggi-jhopdi and wondering what would become of her daughter, a strikingly beautiful girl who stood in for her mother when she was ill.
Rebellious Gauri
At work, Gauri was competent and efficient. She developed a poor opinion of The Times of India and its values and ethos — a subject on which we later agreeably disagreed. Her rebellious spirit was best captured in what came to be called the ‘Admit Two’ episode in the annals of the Old Lady of Boribunder, as the paper is called in Mumbai.
Sometime in 1987, the hoary daily held its sesquicentennial celebrations in Delhi. It was the first time many of us had heard the word sesquicentennial: 150th anniversary. Invitations were sent out for many events and concerts to commemorate the occasion. Apparently, the paper’s management decided one day that the demand to attend the events was too great and the ‘Admit One’ limit on each invitation should be changed to ‘Admit Two’ — by hand because the invites were already printed. Sub-editors on the copy desk — Gauri among them — were called in to make the changes: Each sub-editor was given a stack of invites and asked to strike out the ‘one’ by hand and write ‘two’ in its place.
Gauri declined, arguing that she had been hired as a journalist and it was not her remit to write or correct invitations. She came home fuming. One of our good friends and a frequent visitor at our home during this time was Sabina Sehgal. She was on the corporate side of TOI at that time, and maintained there was nothing wrong with journalists being drafted for that correction; everyone was part of the organisation and had a stake in the success of the sesquicentennial. We argued.
Years later, Sabina would fight her way into my editorial team in Sunday TOI, insisting that it was perfectly okay for managers to transition into journalists if they were a good fit.
Rift in Marriage
Gauri and I were too busy to plan a family, comfortable in the fact that our extended family of friends was large and loving. But we – me, in particular – ended up making some poor decisions on the personal front. Our rather bohemian lifestyle and lack of discipline and self-control – mainly on my part – had its adverse fallout. Before long, our marriage was fraying. Angry and dismayed by the callous disregard for oaths we had both taken to love each other in health and sickness, Gauri announced one day that she wanted to return to Bangalore to be closer to her family.
Meanwhile, I had fallen out of favour in The Telegraph. Rajiv Gandhi had proved to be a big disappointment in office, and my censorious reporting was frowned on by the powers that be. The smear of the Bofors scandal had robbed his administration of its initial sheen. A man who had come to office fresh-faced and energetic, and had promised to get rid of the corrupt power brokers in the party at the centennial party convention he addressed in Mumbai, had been rolled over by the same power brokers and old guard. His political evolution, and deterioration, were aptly captured on an India Today cover which showed how his face had changed every six months or so: It had gone from fresh-faced to sallow and pudgy.
Many in the media and intelligentsia saw an idealist in his dissenting defence minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who would eventually succeed him; others saw in Singh a cynical power player who used the Bofors issue to project himself into the prime ministerial office.
Meanwhile, India entered a period of great ferment in 1989. The VP Singh government, which took office in December 1989 just a few months after we returned to Bangalore to salvage our marriage, was short-lived; as was our effort to save our own union.
(Chidanand Rajghatta is foreign editor of The Times of India, and the longest serving Indian correspondent in the US, covering some six presidential terms (and elections). He is the author of The Horse That Flew: How India’s Silicon Gurus Spread Their Wings. They live in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington DC. The book was published by Context)
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