Gauri Lankesh was shot outside her own home for a decade of criticizing Hindu nationalism in print. The men accused of killing her have all been free on bail for years, one of them recently won a city council seat, and the trial itself has yet to produce a single conviction.
Gauri Lankesh was shot at close range outside her home in the Rajarajeshwari Nagar neighborhood of Bengaluru at around eight o'clock in the evening on September 5, 2017. At least seven bullets were fired; three struck her, in the head, neck, and chest. She died at the scene. She had spent nearly two decades running the Kannada-language weekly Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a publication she inherited and renamed from her father, the poet and journalist P. Lankesh, and had used it consistently to attack Hindu nationalist politics and caste discrimination, positions that had already drawn a defamation conviction and a wave of online threats before her death.
Karnataka's chief minister ordered a twenty one member Special Investigation Team to the case within days, led by an officer named BK Singh. The team eventually built a chargesheet running to roughly nine thousand pages, naming eighteen accused, in filings submitted across 2018. Ballistic analysis tied the gun used to kill her to the same weapon used months earlier in the murder of the scholar M.M. Kalburgi, and investigators have separately linked the broader conspiracy, through forensic and organizational evidence, to the earlier killings of the rationalist campaigners Narendra Dabholkar in 2013 and Govind Pansare in 2015, alleging that a criminal syndicate connected to the religious organization Sanatan Sanstha and its offshoot, the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, was responsible for all four killings.
The man accused of pulling the trigger, Parashuram Waghmore, was taken into judicial custody in June 2018 and, according to investigators, confessed that he had been instructed to act in order to "save his religion." A forensic gait analysis conducted later that year concluded he had, in the investigating team's words, "in all likelihood" been the shooter. An alleged ringleader, Amol Kale, and several others accused of planning, financing, or transporting weapons for the killing were arrested over the following months, though one named suspect, Vikas Patil, has never been apprehended.
The case's procedural path has been unusually tangled. Prosecutors sought to try the accused under Karnataka's organized crime law, a statute carrying tougher penalties and different evidentiary standards than an ordinary murder charge. The state's High Court quashed those organized crime charges against one defendant, only for India's Supreme Court to restore them on appeal in October 2021, ruling in a case brought by Gauri Lankesh's sister, Kavita Lankesh, that a person charged under the statute "need not be a person who had a direct role in the commission of an organized crime as such," and that the High Court had exceeded its jurisdiction by quashing the chargesheet outright.
Killing a journalist has become one of the world's safest crimes, not only in autocratic regimes, but also in democracies.
The trial's slow crawl has come with its own hazards. A protected witness reported being threatened by phone in May 2025 while traveling to testify in Bengaluru; the witness testified anyway the following day, and as of early June 2025 no formal police report had been filed over the threat despite officers acknowledging it had occurred. Beh Lih Yi of the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the case's eighth anniversary in September 2025, said plainly that "killing a journalist has become one of the world's safest crimes, not only in autocratic regimes, but also in democracies," and called for a fast track court to move the case forward.
The political rehabilitation of some defendants has proceeded rather more quickly than their prosecution. In October 2024, several of the men accused in the case were publicly felicitated by Hindu nationalist groups in Karnataka. In January 2026, one of the accused, Shrikant Pangarkar, who investigators say helped arrange firearms and attended a training camp connected to the plot, won a seat on the Jalna Municipal Corporation in neighboring Maharashtra, running as an independent and defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party's own candidate by a margin of roughly twenty six hundred votes.
The broader network of killings connected to Lankesh's case has moved forward, unevenly, on its own separate tracks. A special court convicted two men in the Dabholkar murder in May 2024, sentencing them to life imprisonment while acquitting three others including the man prosecutors had identified as the alleged mastermind; by August 2026, both convicted men had been granted bail pending appeal of even that partial verdict, and Dabholkar's daughter has filed a counter appeal challenging the acquittals. In the Lankesh case itself, the trial that opened in 2022 remains, as of the most recent available reporting, still in the process of examining witnesses, with no verdict in sight nine years after the killing it is meant to resolve.
Lankesh came to journalism in the 1980s writing for English-language publications before taking over the Kannada weekly her father had founded, renaming it in her own name and steering it toward the kind of unflinching political commentary that had made P. Lankesh a household name in Karnataka a generation earlier. The ballistic connections investigators drew between her killing and the murders of Narendra Dabholkar in 2013, Govind Pansare in 2015, and M.M. Kalburgi that same year rest on forensic matches between the weapons used, evidence that Central Bureau of Investigation filings say points to a single, ongoing conspiracy carried out over four years against four separate critics of religious orthodoxy and caste privilege, rather than four unconnected acts of violence. The organized crime statute prosecutors have used to hold the accused in Lankesh's case, the Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act, was designed originally for mafia and extortion networks; applying it to an alleged ideological conspiracy has itself become a live legal question the courts have had to resolve alongside the underlying murder charge.