[Salon] How a Journalist's Murder Led to a Global Investigation Into the Mercenaries Who Sell Disinformation and Destroy Democracies - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz.com
Subject: [Salon] How a Journalist's Murder Led to a Global Investigation Into the Mercenaries Who Sell Disinformation and Destroy Democracies - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz.com
I have been accused of beginning "the attacks on Ron DeSantis who is the major threat to Trump being the GOP presidential nominee in 2024,” an accusation which I’m proud to plead guilty to! Though I’m equally critical of Trump, and their joint “New Right” fanaticism. And the Democrat’s increasing imitation of that with their joint warmongering doing so much to destroy us.
So, speaking as the “Anybody But DeSantis Committee” (ABDC),though that isn’t indicative of favoring any other war-fevered candidate for POTUS, this is on the subject of contemporary fascism so please forgive the multiple links here. But together, they “tell a story,” of fascism. But here is the Bottom-Line Up-Front:
But see from beginning, to 10:40, for the “non-interventionist Conservative” (sarcasm) foreign policy views of this zealous Straussian/National Conservative, “New Rightist,” so beloved by self-proclaimed “non-interventionist Conservatives.” A group of either some of the most duplicitous of U.S. right-wing ideologues, or some of the most obtuse. Or more likely: both, given who they work so zealously for, as can be seen here:
No surprise there. That was entirely predictable, given the “fascist political theory” manifested in Modi’s “movement,” which provided incentive for foreign support (election interference) for his election, by fellow fascists. Which we know came, from among others, the SCL Corporation acting through the anti-Russian Mercer’s and Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica. But now what was readily deducible from the beginning, given "cui bono” of Trump’s election, for anyone with a functioning “mind;” even more is being revealed of the “Israeli fascist right’s” intervention, as Haaretz is reporting on. With Mueller’s “Russiagate” allegations thoroughly discredited, why isn’t anyone talking of Israelgate? Out of sensitivity to Trump and Netanyahu? Of Israeli, and American, fascism?
But no matter. Those Russian allegations accomplished what they were intended to: U.S. War Against Russia. Mission Accomplished! Again, as with Iraq. That these CIA/DOD/militaristic civilian think-tank instigated wars are destroying the U.S. as much as or more than our so-called “Enemies,” is obviously of no matter to these war fanatics, or else they wouldn’t keep repeating themselves.
I won’t go down the list of false Trump/Russian collusion allegations that turned out to involve Trump’s actual backers, which is not at all a defense of Trump. But rather of how Trump’s pro-war militaristic movement and the Fascist Right of Israel in full partnership with right-wing counterparts in the US, with Biden trying to keep up with them, that I’ve shared before. I’ve given up in believing that Americans can ever rise above our innate instinct, and history/traditions, of attacking other nations/peoples, currently like we’re doing to Russia/China/Iran, while concealing it behind “legalistic wordplay.”
But what I can do is to continue calling out as lies the propaganda of the “New Right/National Conservatives,” with their duplicity, while their “Patron,” Peter Thiel, openly promotes the fascist thought of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, with that celebrated by the National Conservatives. As is the election of barely concealed fascists like Giorgia Meloni.
But here is one of Thiel’s stable joining Tom Cotton and other war fanatics in denouncing Biden as “weak,”a longtime favorite meme of US pro-war fanatics, and fascists around the world when orchestrating coups against their nation's governments. As I’m seeing in going through the Goldwater archives as an earlier generation of “New Rightists,” the National Review/CIA circle, charged Eisenhower with: “weakness.” Which was for his favoring “containment, versus their preferred “rollback.” Though Iranians, Guatemalans, Vietnamese, etc., would never have accused Eisenhower of “weakness.”
So here is the Great “National Conservative” and The American Conservative magazine’s favorite, J.D. Vance, lined up shoulder to shoulder with Tom Cotton, and the fanatical pro-war podcast host:
"After the Chinese spy balloon was finally shot down over the Atlantic, are you confident in the capability of the U.S. military if we were to be pulled into a cold war with China in the near future? Also special guests Senator JD Vance & Congressman Jim Jordan."
Vance, with Tom Cotton and other far-right militaristic extremists is complaining here about alleged military incompetence, event though they were promoted long before Biden came in to office, with Trump favoring the most extreme military fanatic during his administration. With him promoting on the basis of maximal militaristic thought: the Ideology of the Offensive. But yet the so-called “New Right” has so much contempt for the intelligence of the likes of Chas Freeman here that they spew out distortions such that we’re to believe Trump came into office actually planning to reduce the influence of the Military Industrial Complex, the “Blob,” which he proceeded to do by trying to drown them in an additional $100 billion on top of the massive budget they already are the beneficiaries of, every year, in perpetuity. Similar to Grover Norquist’s scheme to cut domestic government spending "in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” so there would be more funding for military spending and tax cuts for oligarchs, so favored by libertarians and Trumpites.
But per the article below on the BJP and PM Modi, and his fascist “consolidation of power,” it has to be noted that not only did Israeli election interference “influence operations” get him elected, as something else he has in common with Trump, but with Netanyahu as the fulcrum, they represented an axis of the "Fascist International” as long dreamed of going back to the 1930s. Fascism, as everyone knows, is really nothing more than the most extreme form of militarism, of the “Total War” form, and for that, the military must be disproportionately funded over the civilian sector, as Republicans, and now Democrats almost as much, always insist they must be, especially Trump, DeSantis, Cotton, Pompey, Hawley, Gaetz, et al.
Skip over the "Arbeit macht frei” message at the beginning of this YouTube link and go to the “War Message” beginning at about 1:20 to see what I mean.
President Donald Trump: We Will Have One Of The Greatest Military Buildups In History
"At the Conservative Political Action Conference, President Donald Trump speaks about investment in the country from corporations and the buildup of the military.”
Listen to the Conservatives howl when “beloved military” is spoken.
"President Donald Trump claims the US military is "depleted" and wants more money for "our beloved military" to make it bigger than ever before. He says it will be "one of the greatest military buildups in American history." "No one will dare question our military might again.”
That’s the accusation all the Republicans are charging Biden with today!
President Donald Trump said he signed a $1.3 trillion spending measure Friday, just hours after saying he was considering a veto. He said he's disappointed in the bill, but the "incredible" gains for the military outweighed the idea of a veto. (March 23)
So with all the money Trump threw at the military, why is it so “incompetent” (which I agree with, but not for the same reasons as Vance) only two years into the Biden administration, when it's still the Trump promoted officers in charge, if we’re to believe J.D. Vance (which no one should be crazy enough to do!). The venture capitalist and Peter Thiel’s joint “military knowledge” could be put on the edge of a razor blade, and look like a bb rolling down a 4-lanes highway, as someone once used that analogy. And the same might be said of his “knowledge” as a venture capitalist:
But we’re supposed to listen to his pronouncements on anything military?
So for you “National Conservatives,” and Straussians (I repeat myself), who want to style your political rhetoric and speaking style after Trump, given his great success, here is what is self-evidently his role model:
Discorso del Duce Benito Mussolini a Taranto, 7 settembre 1934
This guy has a bit of work to do to perfect that, but he’s pretty well along ideologically, as the Claremont Institute recognizes, proving his Straussian/Schmittian bona fides, and why Peter Thie loves him:
But see from beginning to 10:40 for the “non-interventionist Conservative” (sarcasm) foreign policy views of this zealous Straussian/National Conservative, “New Rightist,” so beloved by self-proclaimed “non-interventionist Conservatives,” a group of either some of the most duplicitous of U.S. right-wing ideologues, or some of the most obtuse! Or more likely: both, given who they work so zealously for, as can be seen here:
He’s got all the necessary credentials which always endear a “political theorist” to the Conservatives, as it states here: "Dr. Arnn is on the board of directors of The Heritage Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Center of Claremont McKenna College, the Philadelphia Society, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Claremont Institute. He served on the U.S. Army War College Board of Visitors for two years, for which he earned the Department of the Army’s “Outstanding Civilian Service Medal.” In 2015, he received the Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation."
"The Origins of Trump’s Slapdash, Last-Second ‘1776 Report’
"It can be understood as the other side of the coin to Michael Anton’s angry ‘Flight 93’ argument."
From Wikipedia: "He has served as the twelfth president of private college Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, since May 2000.[1] He is a political conservative who has been influenced by the thought of Leo Strauss and Strauss’ student and Arnn’s teacher Harry V. Jaffa.[2]"
A recent article observed that Hillsdale descended into its own unique kind insanity, about 20 years ago; about the time Arnn became President and turned it into “Claremont Institute East,” home of some of the most radical of the New Right.
How a Journalist's Murder Led to a Global Investigation Into the Mercenaries Who Sell Disinformation and Destroy Democracies - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz.com
<Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh, who was killed on September 5, 2017., Credit: Kavitha Lankesh>
Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh, who was killed on September 5, 2017.Credit: Kavitha Lankesh
This article is Part One of the Story Killers project – a global investigation into disinformation mercenaries...
BANGALORE, India – On September 5, 2017, Gauri Lankesh arrived late at her office in Bangalore. It was a warm day in this southern Indian city, known for its breezy weather and traffic. At her office – the ground floor of a faded yellow, three-story building on a residential street – the 55-year-old journalist reviewed the upcoming issue of her weekly magazine and put the finishing touches on her editorial, which she always wrote last.
Concerns about the rise of disinformation in India and her experience as a high-profile target of digital hate campaigns weighed on Lankesh as she wrote the piece, which she titled “In the Age of False News.” She explained how “lie factories” – websites that traffic in rumors and half-truths – spread disinformation in India.
She highlighted a viral rumor about censorship of a Hindu idol by the opposition party, tracing it to one of the most virulent of these sites: Postcard News, run by a local entrepreneur named Mahesh Vikram Hegde. The rumor, she said, was also spread by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other politically motivated individuals who “used the fake news as their weapon.”
She had been finessing the article for several days, and it was set to come out two days later. Setting the piece aside, she was in an uncharacteristically cheerful mood, friends and family remember. She spent the afternoon chatting with feminist activists.
Dusk had settled over Bangalore as Lankesh headed home, weaving through the streets of India’s bustling high-tech capital. Had it been another night, she might have dropped by her sister’s house to binge-watch the show “This Is Us,” as she had done on prior evenings. Instead, she went straight to her home, located in a hamlet of calm, where loud noises are uncharacteristic.
As Lankesh walked up to the entryway of her house, the cracks of four gunshots echoed through the neighborhood. The first shot hit Lankesh below her right shoulder on her back. Two bullets lodged in her abdomen, piercing her vital organs, while a fourth ricocheted off the wall of her house. A motorcyclist and his accomplice fled the scene, shielding their faces from CCTV cameras.
Lankesh – who died instantly – never saw her editorial in print.
The murder soon sent shock waves across India. Hundreds of mourners attended her funeral, holding signs reading “I am also Gauri.”
Within a couple of years, police investigators identified 18 culprits, arresting 17 of them. All were associated with the Hindu nationalist cult Sanatan Sanstha, its affiliate Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and other fringe religious groups.
Members of this unnamed syndicate plotted the assassination for over a year, obtaining weapons, training hired guns and tracking Lankesh’s daily movements, according to police sources. (As of this writing, a trial is ongoing in Bangalore. In an email, Sanatan Sanstha wrote: “Your questions pertain to a case that is sub judice. It would be inappropriate to comment on such matters as the Indian judiciary is an independent body.”)
Forbidden Stories, the Paris-based nonprofit whose mission is to continue the work of threatened, imprisoned or assassinated journalists, pursued Lankesh’s unfinished work. Starting from Lankesh’s premise – that disinformation has become both industrial and weaponized – Forbidden Stories gathered a consortium of 100 journalists, including from Haaretz, spanning 25 countries to investigate the global disinformation-for-hire market as part of a project called Story Killers.
In India, Israel, Central Africa and elsewhere, journalists peeled back the layers of a growing and unregulated market – ranging from small-time fake news peddlers to multinational mercenaries selling disinformation campaigns aimed at subverting democracies.
Now, just over five years after Lankesh’s murder, Forbidden Stories accessed case files, spoke with local police and lawyers, and investigated an unexplored lead in the criminal investigation: How a viral 2012 YouTube video of Lankesh spread across social media and was later shown to the people who allegedly killed her as “justification” for her murder.
Gauri Lankesh. Hundreds of mourners attended her funeral, holding signs reading “I am also Gauri.”Credit: Sheethal Jain
An inconvenient journalist
Lankesh is now a towering figure in Bangalore, where she grew up and later returned in her late 30s. Reporters look back fondly on interactions with her, which some say inspired them to join the field.
Before her death, Lankesh was not a household name – unlike her father. Author of the eponymous Lankesh Patrike (or “Lankesh’s Paper” in Kannada, the local language), P. Lankesh was famous for his investigations on corruption and politics during a time many consider the golden era of Indian journalism – a period of unprecedented editorial independence, starting in the early 1980s.
“My father had brought down governments with his exposés on corruption,” Kavitha Lankesh, Lankesh’s younger sister, told Forbidden Stories in her Bangalore office (located upstairs from where Lankesh had once worked). Gauri Lankesh, she explained, had not started journalism with such ambitions.
She began her career in Delhi, writing everything from criminal investigations to profiles for The Times of India, ETV Telugu and Sunday Magazine. It was not until 2000, when she returned to Bangalore to take over Lankesh Patrike after her father died, that her writing took a political turn and her tongue a sharper edge. The move, colleagues and family recall, led to a “transformation” in how Lankesh understood her role as a journalist.
In 2005, she created a weekly, naming it Gauri Lankesh Patrike. In editorials and reportage from remote regions of Karnataka (the state of which Bangalore is the capital), the weekly took on the establishment and railed against the rise of far-right Hindu nationalists. The paper investigated illegal mining in north Karnataka, local corruption and religious polarization. One of its main targets, however, was the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. (Twice, Lankesh was accused of defamation by BJP lawmaker Pralhad Joshi.)
Lankesh, who described herself as a journalist-activist, saw combating fake news spread by the BJP as part of a larger battle against the Indian far right, colleagues said. “The magazine that she was editing for more than a decade was working against” communal disharmony, a colleague, Dr. H.V. Vasu, told Forbidden Stories, referring to interreligious conflict in India. “So fighting fake news was very much integral to that.”
Even in her early years running the Patrike, the manipulation of information for political gain infused Lankesh’s writings. “He believes in the power of a lie acquiring the garb of truth with constant repetition,” she wrote of former BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In another article debunking a viral rumor, she referred to “the fake ‘facts’ of history,” alluding to claims that a former ruler from the region had attempted to forcibly convert Hindus to Islam.
Her greater visibility as a journalist and activist contesting Hindu nationalism may have troubled powerful interests in Karnataka, considered by some to be a laboratory for seeding narratives geared at creating religious strife.
Speaking from his office off Bangalore’s main drag, advocate B.T. Venkatesh chuckled thinking about the countless times he represented Lankesh in court. “She would fire in every angle,” Venkatesh recalled. “A gangster would file a case against her. A politician would file a case against her. Some businessmen would file a case against her. She would target anyone who was corrupt.”
Even as legal threats mounted, she continued to publish scathing takedowns of the ruling party, as well as opposition figures and corrupt elites. “What she did was something extraordinary. The grit, the gumption, the way she looked at the magazine. In the span of two years, she transformed it,” Venkatesh said.
As Lankesh evolved, so too did India. In the mid-2010s, the Hindu nationalists Lankesh had been writing about went mainstream. The 2014 election of Narendra Modi catapulted the BJP to power thanks, at least in part, to an expansive network of “IT cells” aimed at spreading positive news about the BJP and attacking its detractors – a group to which Lankesh would come to belong.
According to Joyojeet Pal, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who studies disinformation and politicians’ use of social media, IT cells are structured like a pyramid: party leaders are at the top, with a network of influencers at the middle and bottom.
The bottom layer plays a key role in creating and trending narratives, while also maintaining enough distance from the top to give leaders plausible deniability if the digital foot soldiers become too extreme. These low-level influencers also work to discredit those who “dissent” against the party line, such as independent journalists or activists.
“There’s a certain kind of casting of aspersion on their character or motive based on who they are and what they have covered in the past, and the discrediting happens through that association,” Pal said. This causes a “chilling effect on journalists who then don’t want to engage online” anymore, he added.
In personal emails to her ex-husband, journalist Chidanand Rajghatta, Lankesh admitted to feeling disillusioned by this pyramidal ecosystem. “When Modi-mania becomes a popular mantra, when fascist fury becomes part of daily discourse, when distorted news becomes the mantra of mainstream media, when religious fundamentalism blinds people … I get disgruntled, disenchanted, disturbed,” she wrote in August 2016.
Friends said that by the end of her life, Lankesh seemed unwell: her paper was losing subscribers and taking on debt because she refused to take on advertisers, and she had become the target of near-constant online harassment by far-right networks connected to the BJP.
The trolling would peak after Lankesh gave a speech or posted personal photos online that far-right activists would use to portray her as a “loose” woman. The character assassination intensified toward the end of her life, with negative content cross-posted in popular right-wing Facebook pages.
In late 2016, about a year before she was killed, Lankesh’s name trended negatively on Twitter after she was convicted of libel and released on bail. Social media posts described her as a “commie” and “presstitute” (a term combining “press” and “prostitute” typically used to attack female journalists). In one widely shared post, Postcard News – which Lankesh named in her editorial – described her as a “known Hindu hater.” It linked to a now-removed YouTube video of a speech Lankesh had given in 2012.
The posts often elicited angry responses. “Hang them,” one Facebook user commented.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking during a summit in Lucknow, India, last week.Credit: Rajesh Kumar Singh /AP
Lankesh, it seemed, did not let on to the magnitude of the trolling she experienced and often told friends and colleagues not to take online threats seriously. Online trolling “is the [last thing] you should worry about,” investigative journalist Rana Ayyub remembered Lankesh telling her several days before her assassination. “I didn’t know the extent of how vicious it was,” Lankesh’s sister, Kavitha, added.
However, at the suggestion of a colleague, in the final months of her life Lankesh begrudgingly installed a closed-circuit TV camera in her house. Friends also pushed her to hire a security detail, but she thought it unnecessary.
Around that time, Lankesh and colleagues had discussed launching a fact-checking project in the local language, using a decentralized network of WhatsApp groups to counter viral rumors. It was not the first time she had expressed an interest in fact-checking. According to her friends and colleagues, though, the idea of doing so more rigorously and professionally had emerged toward the end of her life.
In the days before her death, Lankesh compulsively shared fact-checks on her personal Twitter account, including from Alt News – a fact-checking site run by Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha. (They were later nominated for a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize for their work on disinformation in India.)
Her final editorial, colleagues and family said, was borne from an obsessive quest for truth – but also to admit an error in judgment.
In the editorial, Lankesh disclosed that she had accidentally shared a doctored image on Facebook. The photo appeared to show a large rally in favor of the opposition Indian National Congress. However, it had been manipulated to inflate the size of the crowd, fact-checkers later revealed. “There was no intent to incite communal reaction or propaganda,” she wrote. “I only wanted to convey the message that people are coming together against fascist forces.” She concluded with a call to action: “I want to salute all those who expose fake news. I wish there were more of them.”
The many-headed hydra
On a typical weekday in April 2022, the sound of typing filled a small office in central Bangalore. Here, in the newsroom of Naanu Gauri – or “I Am Gauri” – about 10 journalists were working beneath a large photo of the assassinated journalist.
After her death, colleagues and friends launched Lankesh’s fact-checking project, establishing the Gauri Media Trust and Naanu Gauri, an independent digital media outlet. Today, the small team produces news analysis and reporting, and fact-checks several pieces of fake news per day. However, it struggles to keep up with the torrent of disinformation, according to staff writer Muttu Raju.
Journalists and experts said that Bangalore-based Postcard News, run by Hegde – a Hindu influencer who boasts of Prime Minister Modi following him on Twitter – is still one of the biggest players in India’s right-wing media ecosystem. In the years following Lankesh’s death, the website incessantly shared misleading information about the murder investigation, seeking to deflect blame onto left-wing groups Lankesh had worked with, including Maoists, and away from the Hindu nationalist outfit connected to the murder.
Picking up where Lankesh left off, Forbidden Stories investigated Postcard News. We found that in the years following Lankesh’s killing, Hegde grew closer to the BJP, co-founding a company that lists an active BJP adviser as a director. His media empire, which also includes a popular YouTube channel called TV Vikrama, took off and has over 300,000 daily subscribers.
Hegde’s growth is despite a 2018 lawsuit filed against him for spreading fake news and two police complaints for publishing defamatory content and a possible forged document. (The 2018 lawsuit was dropped in September 2022 because the petitioner, the Karnataka Cyber Crime Police, was “not interested in prosecuting the matter.”)
In August 2021, Hegde co-founded a PR firm, Wise Index Media, which lists two additional directors: Shrikanth Kote and Beluru Sudarshana. The latter – a former journalist – is special adviser for e-governance under the current BJP Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai. He was first elevated to the post by then-Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa in 2019 and again in December 2021 after a change of cabinet. (Bommai did not respond to questions sent by mail and WhatsApp. Through a spokesperson, Yediyurappa refused to comment.)
On its website, Wise Index Media claims to specialize in “Digital Media Management, Political communication, Profiling and Public Relations management, Image Building, Political strategy placement and Data Analysis.” The company’s website hints at its offerings, which include election campaigns, social media management, profile handling and personal image building.
Wise Index Media co-founder Kote told Forbidden Stories the company was created to provide visibility to grassroots initiatives and welfare projects in Karnataka. However, he did not comment on who its clients were. Sudarshana, he said, was “not an employee of the BJP,” and was simply an adviser working on digitization of government initiatives.
“There’s no political connectivities to e-governance,” he said. “I don’t see any conflict of interest.” (Sudarshana refused to comment.)
While the Wise Index Media site makes no direct mention of Postcard News, hyperlinks under the “About Us” section redirect to Postcard pages. Hegde, who brags on his personal website about having played a “pivotal role” in Modi’s 2019 reelection campaign, appears to have used Wise Index Media as a fundraising vessel for the BJP. In September 2022, in a series of social media posts, he called on temples to make donations to celebrate Modi’s 72nd birthday. A handful of these temples wrote checks to Wise Index Media. (In a WhatsApp message, Hegde responded: “Please send me more jokes.” When Forbidden Stories tried calling, he reiterated that he was “not interested” in responding to our questions.)
Forbidden Stories’ findings align with Hegde’s past statements about his proximity to the BJP, including allegedly telling police that he “had the blessings of several top right-wing leaders” after he was arrested for spreading disinformation in March 2018. Tejasvi Surya, the lawyer who initially represented Hegde in court in this case, is now a prominent member of the BJP and head of the party’s youth wing. (Surya did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Postcard News is part of a “very large ecosystem” of media organizations linked to Hindu nationalist groups and the BJP, explained a digital rights activist who requested anonymity. “It’s a growing media ecology,” they said.
These organizations, experts said, are typically kept at arm’s length. This gives the BJP plausible deniability if they step beyond certain bounds – such as employing violent or extreme language.
The University of Michigan’s Pal said that in recent years there has been a “gradual mainstreaming” of media organizations at least loosely affiliated with right-wing entities, including Postcard, The Frustrated Indian and Sudarshan News, a right-wing TV channel. “What they do much more than fake news is suggestion,” he said. “These organizations are often run by very thin staff, and they tap into these mid-level influencers in the pyramid structure” of right-wing groups online.
“Once they get to a certain point of outreach, they start getting more and more extreme because they need to be even further out than whatever television will say,” he added.
While some such organizations operate on a volunteer basis, others have profited off the increasingly lucrative market for on-demand propaganda services, researchers say. “Political parties are now working with a wide range of actors including private firms, volunteer networks and social media influencers to shape public opinion over social media,” a team of researchers from Oxford University wrote in a 2020 report on the growing market for propaganda services – estimated at $60 million worldwide.
Even before Lankesh’s assassination, these offerings had proliferated in India. One company proposed “weaponized information” services used to “pollute” search engines and “manipulate” current events en masse – proof that the world Lankesh described in her editorial has indeed come to pass. Many experts describe these networks as a hydra – growing back new heads when one is chopped off.
It often felt like Lankesh was facing up against a similarly hydra-like structure, her sister Kavitha said. “It’s not just one organization. It gets seeped out to many, many organizations,” she said. “It can be next door to you.”
Congress party workers shouting slogans during a protest accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government of using military-grade spyware to monitor political opponents, journalists and activists, New Delhi, July 2021.Credit: Manish Swarup / AP
Victim of disinformation
In July 2022, the doors of the Bangalore City Civil and Sessions Court opened to a small audience, comprised of lawyers and journalists. Seventeen suspects, almost all of them linked to the Hindu nationalist cult Sanatan Sanstha and associated right-wing groups, were standing trial for Lankesh’s murder.
Journalists and lawyers who spoke with Forbidden Stories described an exceptionally well-run investigation – rare in a country with one of the highest levels of impunity for crimes against the media. A “special investigative unit” created to probe the case got to work quickly: matching bullet casings to similar crimes committed in the past few years, matching empty cartridges to a 7.65mm pistol and identifying the getaway vehicle through closed-circuit TV footage. From there, it took just six months to arrest an initial suspect: Naveen Kumar. Several months later, investigators filed a roughly 10,000-page indictment, naming 17 additional suspects – one of whom is still at large.
The group of assassins, they determined, were part of an “organized crime syndicate” operating across states in southern India. The syndicate is accused of several high-profile bomb attacks in the early 2000s across Goa, the coastal state neighboring Karnataka. Through forensics, investigators tied Lankesh’s death to the murder of three other public intellectuals also allegedly killed by this group’s members.
Amol Kale, the presumed mastermind behind the murder, selected right-wing activists at religious gatherings and trained them to become killers. Parashuram Waghmare, known as “builder” for his compact form, pulled the trigger.
According to case files, Kale trained the hired guns over a months-long indoctrination process that included meditation, arms training and religious education. They were made to read Lankesh’s articles and watch videos of her speeches. At least five members of the syndicate were shown a video of a 2012 speech Lankesh had given in Mangalore, a city in southern Karnataka, in which she is heard questioning Hinduism’s roots. Waghmare, the hired gun, could cite lines from the video, suggesting he had been shown the video “repeatedly,” according to a local police investigator who spoke with Forbidden Stories anonymously. (A lawyer representing the accused replied: “As the matter [is] pending adjudication I am unable to help you.”)
At a meeting in a rented safe house, the plotters decided Lankesh had to be killed “at any cost,” the case file reads. “If left unchecked she would cause disrepute and create a bad opinion about Hindu dharma in the society,” they allegedly concluded, referring to an individual’s duty fulfilled by observance of custom or law.
One journalist familiar with the case, who asked to remain anonymous, said the popular narrative that Lankesh was anti-Hindu – which was reinforced through online and traditional media – played a key role in her assassination. “They decided to target Gauri because of how she was perceived,” the journalist told Forbidden Stories. “The right wing in Karnataka has been systematically targeting these writers: discrediting, delegitimizing these intellectuals.” The hatred, they added, “grew and grew and grew.”
According to local police sources, the 2012 video – downloaded onto Kale’s laptop from YouTube – was one element in a “gradual indoctrination” process. But this video, Forbidden Stories found through a forensic analysis conducted in partnership with researchers at Princeton’s Digital Witness Lab, spread widely across Indian far-right groups. This contributed to an intense and vitriolic character assassination that painted Lankesh as anti-Hindu well before the plan to assassinate her had been hatched.
Using open-source tools, researchers found evidence of eight different YouTube links that were shared widely on Facebook, including three that had more than 100 million interactions (likes, shares and comments). In 2014, the official page for the BJP in Karnataka shared the video with a warning: “The next time we hear such speeches we should give a fitting legal reply.”
“The BJP Karnataka post sharing the earliest YouTube video received little engagement from Facebook users. But the fact that the video made it there two years after it was originally uploaded speaks to its reach,” said Surya Mattu, who leads the Digital Witness Lab. (BJP Karnataka did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
As of April 2019 – the last time it was archived before being taken down – the most popular version of the video had over 250,000 views and hundreds of comments on YouTube. In at least several cases, the video was published across multiple accounts mimicking the same language, suggesting potentially coordinated posting. In each case, the video is lightly edited and opens with a black screen that flashes the words “WHY I HATE SECULARISM IN INDIA.”
According to Guillaume Chaslot, a former Google engineer who studies how YouTube’s algorithm promotes hate speech, sublimating acts of violence instead of calling for violence directly is a common strategy for gaming YouTube’s algorithm. “As you ban certain types of content based on keywords, people will find other ways to state things,” he said. “Instead of stating ‘You should kill this person,’ they can say ‘This is a Hindu hater, he should be lowered to hell’ – things like that.”
In a statement, Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, wrote: “YouTube’s policies are global, and we apply them consistently across the platform, regardless of the subject or the creator's background, political viewpoint, position or affiliation. Over the years, we’ve invested in the products and policies needed to help address harmful content, with the vast majority of violative videos removed today with less than 10 views.”
The video was further deformed in the editing process, Forbidden Stories found. According to K.L. Ashok, who coordinated the event where Lankesh spoke, her speech was not intended as an attack against Hinduism. “It was shortened to include only the part where she says Hindu religion does not have a father or mother. The intention of saying that was to highlight the plurality of the religion. There are thousands of castes and several beliefs,” he said.
The video was less viral on Twitter, Forbidden Stories and Digital Witness Lab found, but may have been used to drum up offline attacks. However, our analysis showed that the video was cross-posted from Facebook by an account called @GarudaPurana. This belongs to the right-wing activist Bhuvith Shetty, held in connection to several acts of violence and online hate speech. In 2014, Shetty authored a Change.org petition that sought to have Lankesh arrested for “hurting religious sentiments.” (Forbidden Stories reached out to Shetty on Twitter, but had not received a response at press time.)
Lankesh had been scheduled to appear in court 10 days after her assassination for a lawsuit against her alleging that the speech had disrupted communal harmony. “[I] am facing a case because of this speech,” she wrote on Twitter several months earlier. “I stand by every word I said.”
She never had the chance to stand before the court or defend herself in the eyes of the public.
Additional reporting by Srishti Jaswal for Forbidden Stories. Oishika Neogi (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project), Prajwal Bhat (The News Minute) and Laura Höflinger (Der Spiegel) contributed interviews and research.