In an essay published in the website Scroll earlier this year, Gauri Lankesh wrote of how her home town, Bengaluru, once known for its progressive and emancipatory ethos, was now increasingly captive to patriarchal and authoritarian tendencies. When she was young, wrote Lankesh, women in Bangalore were free to live their own lives, to follow their own instincts, to forge personal and professional paths in a manner unknown or at least uncommon in other cities. But now, she wrote sadly, women in Bengaluru could no longer move freely in ‘public spaces without fear of lecherous goons, fundamentalist fanatics and brainless men in power who point out to outfits that women wear instead of the muck that is filled between the ears of sick men as the root cause of molestation’.
Six months after Gauri Lankesh wrote these words, she was murdered, not for what she wore, but for what she wrote. Fundamentalist fanatics had long targeted her, for her fearless criticisms of the hateful and divisive politics that were threatening to tear her state and her country apart. That she spoke so clearly and so sincerely enraged them; as did the fact that she was a woman.
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