Mukul Kesavan - Killing conversation The death of Shujaat Bukhari
The deaths of Shujaat
Bukhari and Gauri Lankesh have different local histories and a few all-India
similarities. Lankesh and Bukhari were both journalists who had worked for what
passes as the national English press before committing themselves to
publications principally aimed at readerships in their states. After a career
working for The Times of India and later Sunday,
Lankesh took over her father's magazine, Lankesh Patrike, and then
went on to edit the Gauri Lankesh Patrike, while Bukhari moved from
being a correspondent with The Hindu to founding Rising
Kashmir, an English newspaper based in Srinagar.
It isn't clear who
Gauri Lankesh's killers were. Recent newspaper reports suggest that the police
have closed in on a suspect affiliated to a vigilante organization notorious
for communal goonery, the Sri Ram Sene, but there has been no trial or
conclusive verdict. Similarly, no one has taken responsibility for Bukhari's
assassination, though online suspicion ranges from jihadi separatists
to the deep state. They were both shot by murderers on motorcycles, seemingly
the preferred modus operandi for Indian assassins looking to
silence dissenting journalists, intellectuals and rationalists. Narendra
Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, Malleshappa Kalburgi, Gauri Lankesh are now joined
in their violent deaths by Shujaat Bukhari.
These killings show
that the journalists most at risk in India are those who report from a ground
zero that is also their home. Bukhari, like Lankesh, was a journalist who had
gone out into the world and then chosen to return, to produce a Kashmiri
newspaper that wasn't a partisan mouthpiece, one that produced news about
Kashmir which couldn't be dismissed either as jihadi press
releases or inspired leaks from a sarkari stool pigeon. This
didn't mean that he was a neutral; it would have taken inhuman detachment for a
Kashmiri Muslim from the Valley to be even-handed about the violence visited
upon his people by the State. What it did mean was that he was committed to
keep the news flowing, to keep dialogue going, to supporting any process that
would mitigate the violence that had engulfed the place he called home.
To stand up for his
principles as a journalist in a conflict zone took courage of an order that few
of us possess. To continue to do this despite having a young family, despite
having been kidnapped before, living under armed guard, suspected of being a
traitor both by fanatical militants and the increasingly communalized agencies
of the State, was everyday heroism of an order that we're either too cynical or
too embarrassed to acknowledge. For the social media choruses of the security
State and think tank hawks, Bukhari was a 'soft-separatist' or a 'quasi-Islamist'.
These hyphenated terms belong to a class of conspiratorial neologisms coined to
demonize positions that right-wing Hindu supremacists dislike.
'Pseudo-secularist' is the most famous of these. In the same way as Bukhari was
classified as a soft-separatist, Gauri Lankesh was tagged as an 'urban-Naxal'
in the unhinged echo-chambers of the Hindu Right, hours after she was murdered.
In an article he wrote
for the BBC in July 2016, immediately after the killing of Burhan Wani, Bukhari
bore witness to the dangers of being an independent journalist in Kashmir... read more:
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/killing-conversation-238189