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All has turned red: Remembering Gauri Lankesh
By Samvartha 'Sahil'. Dated: 9/12/2017 12:11:36 PM
It was the monsoon of 2004. Handful of journalists had entered the 'naxal infested forest' in Karnataka to meet Naxalites and do ground reporting after being invited for a meeting as such by the then leader. Gauri Lankesh was one among the few journalists from different media houses.
In the following issue of Lankesh Patrike (she had not yet started her own weekly then) in her editorial and report Gauri spoke of Comrade Prem, who was spearheading the naxalite movement in Karnataka, being her senior in college years before he moved into armed rebellion. Gauri had interviewed him and in her editorial (kempaadavo ella kempaadavo | All has turned red ) quoted a poem by Comrade Prem. A poem penned in 1995, where Prem is responding to the judicial murder of the human rights activist of Nigeria- Ken Saro Viwa saying, "It was a lesson you learned too late. Your pen playwright should have been backed by the gun alright?"
Ken who was fighting for the Ogoni tribe and against the multi-national Shell oil company was hanged to death by the then Nigerian regime.
The lines of Comrade Prem sounded so convincing to me back then when I was a naive teenager.
But then in 2005 when Prem was hunted and gunned by the star machinery I was shocked to learn that Comrade Prem was Saket Rajan, an author of two volumes of Karnataka History titled Making History and also a gold medallist from IIMC.
Those days when the Naxalite movement of Karnataka and especially Saket Rajan was being discussed by the media and public, I kept recollecting his poem fondly and juxtaposed it with what I read in newspapers: Saket Rajan being killed in an encounter and how next to his body was a gun that he was carrying. I told myself that Saket Rajan was proven wrong by history.
So later Gauri initiated and toiled to bring naxalites to mainstream years later in Karnataka. I was not just proud of her I did express my solidarity with her.
Now in 2017 after seeing Gauri being killed, I wonder what is Saket going to tell her if at all there is an afterlife and if the two good old friends are to meet in a world beyond this world? Will he say what he had told Ken Saro Viwa: "it was a lesson you learned too late. Your pen should have been backed by the gun alright!"?? To be honest, I don't know what he would say, how Gauri would respond to it and to begin with I don't even know if there is an afterlife or not. But I know for sure that those who sweat and toil to make the world stand on its legs will be crushed and smashed by the state by the system and it doesn't matter if they are backed by the gun or not!
But then when Ken's murder did not stop or silence Saket and Saket's murder did not stop or silence Gauri, we shouldn't be stopped or silenced by the murder of Gauri. Because with or without the gun what all these three fighters, rebels forming a diverse yet connected and continuous history are propagating through their lives is to keep fighting and keep speaking to make the world stand on its legs.
Numbed by the murder of a comrade of concern and an understanding friend trying to digest the fact that she is no more physically, I recollect a line of Neruda: "True life is without silence. Only death remains dumb" from his poem titled Communication from the collection Isla Negra. I also recollect a graffiti that I used to cross every day during my days at JNU. The graffiti read: "Let life be dead, but death must not be allowed to live," a quote attributed to Karl Marx.
People like Gauri are not silent even in their death and even in death they fight death and ensure death will not be allowed to live.
(The author is a freelance writer based out of Manipal. An alumnus of JNU, Delhi and FTII, Pune and has worked with The Hindu and Manipal University earlier.)