Book Review: ‘I Am on the Hit List,’ by Rollo Romig

I AM ON THE HIT LIST: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, by Rollo Romig

A decade after their electoral victories kick-started a barbaric epoch of Indian history, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist legislators in his Bharatiya Janata Party no longer appear as dominant as they once did. This year’s elections saw the B.J.P. lose much of its power over the country, as the INDIA alliance — a broad coalition led by the more pluralistic Congress Party — won nearly as many seats as Modi’s party did, forcing it to find new partners to cobble together a governing majority.

None of this was expected. Essential democratic institutions — the elections overseers, the judiciary, the media — had been politicized and packed with Modi supplicants. Political opponents and minorities were disenfranchised, attacked and often even killed by Hindu nationalist gangs, or detained on specious charges by the police.

Despite these threats, it seems that large-scale demonstrations and protests over the years from college students, farmers and celebrity athletes have made some progress in preserving Indian democracy. “I Am on the Hit List,” by the journalist Rollo Romig, is the story of one of India’s most vigorous protesters: Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken journalist from the southern state of Karnataka.

Lankesh was the editor of Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a well-regarded but little-known local weekly that published sensational articles with irreverent headlines. A classic example: She referred to members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — the prominent Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization with links to the B.J.P. — as “chaddis,” or “underpants,” because of the khaki shorts they wore.

In September 2017, two people on a motorcycle drove up to her home in Bangalore and shot her to death. Within 48 hours, protests began to spring up across the country. The response to her killing demonstrated not only how beloved Lankesh was, Romig writes, but just how much anger and frustration simmered beneath the surface of the B.J.P.’s illiberal rule.

Five years ago, Romig detailed Lankesh’s life and impact for The New York Times Magazine. In this new telling, he zooms out from his subject to tell the story of India’s labyrinthine past, troubling present and perhaps more hopeful future. It is an exploration of the difficulty in confronting ethnic majoritarianism and an energizing look at the affirming power of solidarity.

In “I Am on the Hit List,” Romig takes stock of the rich literary tradition in the southern part of India, a region that “rarely gets its due,” he writes, even within the country. Lankesh descended from a thriving lineage of South Indian writers and artists, including her own famous father, the poet and journalist P. Lankesh, who edited the influential weekly Lankesh Patrike. (Romig calls the publication “an unholy merger of The New Yorker and The New York Post,” and credits it with taking down two state government administrations.)

After her father’s death in 2000, Gauri took charge of the paper, but found herself staggering under the weight of its legacy — there were dust-ups with staffers, almost all of whom soon quit. Eventually, she started her own scrappy yet potent lefty tabloid under her own name.

Romig paints a full picture of the social and professional world that convulsed in the wake of Gauri’s death. We hear from siblings, exes, friends, lawyers and fellow activists about her outspoken, unflinching advocacy on behalf of all India’s downtrodden and marginalized, from transgender women to Maoist guerrilla militants. (“We actually didn’t realize the space she filled,” one activist tells Romig, marveling at the diversity of causes for which Lankesh had advocated before her assassination. “Now we see that no one is ready to fill that space.”)

We also learn more about the titular “Hit List.” Around 2015, after three prominent left-wing activists — Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalburgi — were murdered by assassins on motorbikes, Indian progressives started ranking public figures in order of who was most likely to be offed next. Lankesh traveled frequently, usually to face defamation charges, and made friends everywhere she went. She also received threats regularly, but refused police protection. She placed herself fourth on that list, as a joke.

When they came for her, the assassins used the same gun they had used to kill Kalburgi. And, as it turns out, there was an actual list. After the suspected killers were arrested, the police found a collection of names in their diaries consisting of various figures seen as “traitors” to Hinduism. They were going through them one by one.

In the days after Lankesh’s killing, a B.J.P. state legislator suggested that her murder might have resulted from a headline — “Death to the Underpants” — another quip at the expense of the paramilitary organization closely tied to the B.J.P. It seemed as if her killers could have been affiliated with Modi’s government. Still, as Romig’s book demonstrates, despotism doesn’t always function so neatly.

The likeliest explanation, Romig finds, was something even sadder and more pathetic than a B.J.P. hit job. Video of remarks Lankesh made in 2012 questioning why Hinduism had no central founder like other major religions reached members of a once-fringe Hindu nationalist sect known as Sanatan Sanstha, whose goal was to quiet anyone it perceived as blaspheming Hinduism, no matter the actual significance of the person. They drew up a list and put her name on it. After chasing every angle, Romig is ultimately persuaded, as police investigators also were, that members of the group must have carried out the murder on their own.

But the people who grieved Lankesh’s death are not wrong to point a finger at Modi and his ruling party. While her killing may not have been ordered from the top, the impunity and permissiveness granted by the government — which conveys its approval to rank-and-file bigots like a mob boss, with gestures and hints — may be just as effective.

“In the years since Lankesh’s murder, Sanatan Sanstha has flourished,” as Romig grimly explains, thanks to encouraging signals from on high. In 2019, Modi’s government enacted a law that granted citizenship to religious minorities fleeing to India from other nearby countries — except, conspicuously, to Muslims. When the government went to court to defend the law, Romig writes, it “presented a letter from Sanatan Sanstha as part of its evidence.”

As a dedicated biography of Lankesh and a guide to the complex religious and cultural tensions in India, “I Am on the Hit List” sometimes falls short. Romig’s narrative of discovery — with its winding path of tips and theories that often lead nowhere — can, on occasion, drift into navel gazing.

Still, Romig makes for a powerful, effective chronicler of this bleak moment in Indian politics. His book makes clear that Lankesh was always much more than a name on a hit list, and that the recent electoral checks on the B.J.P.’s power (especially thanks to voters in her part of India) are proof of how the resistance she and other unyielding activists embodied has, finally, bit by bit, death by tragic death, made some serious movement.

It’s too soon to say whether India’s democratic backslide is finally in reverse. In June, even after losing seats in the election, the B.J.P. gave prosecutors the go-ahead to pursue a case against the novelist and frequent Modi critic Arundhati Roy over a speech she gave 14 years ago. But so long as people continue to fight to be heard — and speak out on behalf of everyone oppressed by Hindu nationalist rule — there is still hope that the spirit of democracy can prevail in India.

I AM ON THE HIT LIST: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India | By Rollo Romig | Penguin Books | 390 pp. | Paperback, $18