Bullets Have Names

Who killed Gauri, Kalburgi, Dabholkar, Pansare? the puzzle cracks, slowly.

- Ajay Sukumaran in Bangalore

Bullets, once fired, have their own stories to tell. In their unique signatures—the tiny markings, the tell-tale dents. Not very long after the assassination of journalist-activist Gauri lankesh on September 5 last year, a piece of ballistic evidence—a vital part of the vast and complex jigsaw puzzle of conspiracies and murders—was seen by investigators in Karnataka as a link to the killing of rationalist-writer M.M. Kalburgi, who was gunned down in 2015 in Dharwad, more than 400km from Bangalore. Kalburgi’s killing, it is suspected, is further connected to the identically-executed murders of two other rationalists, Narendra Dabholkar (2013) and Govind Pansare (2015), in Maharashtra.

Gauri Lankesh, editor of the Kannada weekly Gauri Lankesh Patrike and a strident critic of the RSS-BJP, was shot dead by two assailants on a motorcycle outside her home in Bangalore. A year later, the trail of a network of radical Hindu right-wing operatives that investigators in Karnataka have been piecing together now appears to be widening, and their paths criss-crossing. All through last week, the action shifted to Maharashtra where the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrested Sachin Andure, the alleged killer of Dabholkar.

The CBI last week told a Pune court that it is probing links between Andure with some of those arrested in the Lankesh case. Here’s how the events unravelled: on August 10, the Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad (ATS) arrested Hindutva activist Vaibhav Raut of Nalasopara town near Mumbai and two others, Sharad Kalaskar and Sudhanva Gondhalekar, and seized a large cache of explosives and arms. Kalaskar’s interrogation, police say, led them to Andure.