Unravelling the death of Gauri Lankesh

A journalistic investigation into the murder of Gauri Lankesh in September 2017 and the many questions that swirled around it, which doubles up as a frank but sensitive biography of the journalist and activist.

- Indulekha Aravind

A portrait of the city of Bengaluru, warts and all, painted as only someone who loves the city can. An improbable segue into the lore of St Thomas, the apostle believed to have travelled all the way to Kerala in the first century AD, as a way of exploring how personalities get mythologised. A second detour which dives into a more contemporary killing in Tamil Nadu, concluding with a reflection on moral licensing (the idea that the more good a person does, the more licence they give themselves to do bad) and murder. Through it all, a running thread of the apprehensions around the present and future of India among those who believe in democracy and secularism.

The very idea of having such a variety of themes between the covers of a single book sounds unwieldy. Yet, American journalist Rollo Romig brings these strands together with such dexterity that at no point does the narrative of I Am on the Hit List strike a discordant note. This may be Romig's debut book, but he is a seasoned features writer, who has written multiple stories on south India.

What drew me to I Am on the Hit List, in fact, was the memory of his excellent profile of P. Rajagopal, founder of the Saravana Bhavan chain of restaurants who was accused of murder, published in The New York Times Magazine over a decade ago. That piece finds a place in the book by way of an interlude, where Romig examines the parallels in the rationalisation of murders by the accused—both Lankesh's and in the one ordered by Rajagopal.

The book's opening chapter asks a question that many, including those closest to Lankesh, wrestled with in the days and weeks after she was shot down at her own doorstep on the night of 5 September 2017: "Why Gauri?"

Yes, she was an outspoken critic of Hindutva, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, both in the pages of the Kannada weekly