Cold calculation

The Special Investigation Team finds that the Sanatan Sanstha, a right-wing organisation, did meticulous planning to eliminate the Bengaluru-based journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh, who was a strong critic of the Hindutva ideology.

Published : Dec 05, 2018 12:30 IST

  Gauri Lankesh.

Gauri Lankesh.

THE facts, many of which are still emerging, are chilling. Macabre intentions, months of meticulous planning, designs for a Hindu Rashtra, a network of recruiters and sleeper cells, webs of intrigue, murders, and so on. The mastermind or masterminds are yet to be conclusively identified or caught, and the joining of all the dots is yet to be completed, so it is still hard to ascertain the scale of the damage that was being envisaged. This is the scary picture one gets from the charge sheet filed by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Karnataka Police that is investigating the killing of the activist-journalist Gauri Lankesh in September 2017 by two motorcycle-borne assailants.

The facts that have emerged, however, confirm what was suspected for months: radicalised Hindutva groups opposed to her writings and opinions conspired to eliminate her; these groups’ members strictly followed the guidelines and principles mentioned in Kshatradharma Sadhana , a philosophy professed and written in a book by the Sanatan Sanstha, a right-wing Hindutva organisation located in Ponda, Goa, and founded by Dr Jayant Athavale, which has been in the news for its hard-line views and as a suspected perpetrator of saffron terror (an accusation that the organisation continues to deny). The organisation was allegedly plotting more sinister operations, including the strategic elimination of 43 liberals and rationalists. In the line of fire were the award-winning writer/actor Girish Karnad, the rationalists Professor K.S. Bhagawan and Narendra Nayak, the Dalit intellectual and Viduthalai Chiruthagal Katchi leader D. Ravi Kumar from Tamil Nadu and even a Hindu pontiff. Gauri Lankesh had been labelled as a “durjan” (evil being) as identified by Kshatradharma Sadhana .

The manner of her killing was very similar to the murders of three rationalists—Narendra Dabholkar in 2013 and Govind Pansare and Professor M.M. Kalburgi in 2015.

Kshatradharma Sadhana , according to the Sanatan Sanstha, is the spiritual practice of protecting “seekers” and destroying evildoers. Kshatradharma Sadhana advocates the killing of durjan s and the establishment of “God’s kingdom”. The philosophy states that “real seekers, that is those who do not want anything other than the realisation of God, should start making lists of evildoers”; that “it is a sin not to slay an evildoer”, and that evildoers should be destroyed “from their very roots”. To many who follow this extremist philosophy, the list of evildoers is long. It includes atheists and “selfish” union leaders. But it considers Hindus who criticise Hinduism the worst durjan s. Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh fell in this category. What is frightening is that according to the SIT charge sheet, there are at least 50 more sleeper cells in Karnataka.

In its November 23 charge sheet, which runs to 9,235 pages, the SIT has listed 18 persons as conspirators. Under the provisions of the Karnataka Control of Organised Crimes Act (KCOCA), 2000, these people have been termed as members of an organised crime syndicate and charged with the killing of Gauri Lankesh. While 16 people are in police custody, two are on the run. According to the SIT, “the members of the organised crime syndicate” were painstakingly brought together between 2010 and 2011 by the “inner circle” of the Sanatan Sanstha. The group, under the the leadership of Dr Virendra Tawade, also known as “Bade Bhaisaab”, a member of the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, is alleged to be an offshoot of the Sanatan Sanstha and is closely associated with it. Financial support for the crime syndicate was alleged to have been provided by a former editor of a Goa-based newspaper, Sanatan Prabhat, who died of a heart attack before the SIT could interrogate him. According to the SIT charge sheet, the plan was to eliminate critics of the right wing and those who did not align themselves with its extreme ideology.

The charge sheet says: “The organised crime syndicate met, conspired and trained at various places in Karnataka and Maharashtra. They were indoctrinated and actively underwent arms training, shooting practice and trained in the manufacture and use of bombs with the intention of promoting insurgency and creating fear in the [ sic ] society.” Investigations have unearthed that all the accused have a history of crime, rage, aggression and lawlessness; were active in towns across Maharashtra and Karnataka; and are far-right sympathisers. Most of the accused were identified at satsang s and sabhas of the Hindutva brigade and were recruited after months of close surveillance. The accused were in constant touch with each other, conversing only in Hindi, hiding their real identities even from one another, only using nicknames like Bhai, Bharat, Mechanic, Uncle or other assumed aliases, and used separate, dedicated phones (other than their personal mobile phones) for syndicate activities. Coin phone booths were favoured for communication, and only a few trusted operatives were given mobile phones, which were used exclusively for the syndicate’s operations. The SIT had one of its operatives man coin booths in a bid to trap members of the gang. An accused visited a coin booth 120 times during the two months that he was under surveillance.

Mounting evidence indicates that all the four murders were conducted by the same set of radicals, the only difference being that the killers had become more cautious since the killing of Dabholkar. While in the earlier killings the assassins had not even bothered to cover their faces, for Gauri Lankesh’s murder they wore full-face helmets. Also, during the slaying of Gauri Lankesh, the assassins used two sets of clothes. After pumping four bullets into her, they rode to a pre-designated location and removed their outer garments so that even if they were apprehended no gunshot residue would be found on their clothing.

An officer explained: “We took 14 months since we wanted to collect solid evidence, tie up the loose ends, and we have got solid evidence. Unfortunately, it is only circumstantial evidence. There are no eyewitnesses to the shooting. And the source of funding is yet to be identified. We have sought permission from the Special Court to continue our investigations. Another charge sheet will be filed very shortly.”

In the words of an officer from the SIT: “Lankesh’s gunning down was a blind case.” There had been murders of three other activists who were against right-wing extremism and Hindu dogma, but the SIT was unsure whether there was a link between the three, leave alone with the Gauri Lankesh murder. Speaking to Frontline , an officer disclosed that given the blind nature of the case, conventional methods would not have yielded results. So deductive reasoning, pure risk analysis, inference and supposition, real detective work, technical and physical surveillance, “gait analysis” of the feed from over 500 CCTV cameras and “touch DNA” from sweat, saliva and hair were employed. Literally, lakhs of call detail records (CDR)—the data record produced by a telephone exchange or other telecommunications equipment that documents the details of a telephone call or other telecommunications transaction (text message) that passes through that facility or device—spread over a one-year period were gathered. Machine learning—an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that develops, enables and equips computer programmes with the ability to access data and “automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed”—was also used.

The SIT wrote its own algorithms. To enable the collection of mobile phone data without a warrant, the SIT used “Tower Dumps”.

An officer said: “This was ‘real’ detective work.” According to another SIT official, initially the investigations focussed on four possible reasons that could have led to Gauri Lankesh’s murder. Was there enmity within the Lankesh family? (Gauri Lankesh’s brother, Indrajit, had threatened her and brandished a gun at her in 2005.) Was there the possibility of disgruntled left-wing elements unhappy with her work in facilitating the surrender and rehabilitation of naxalites turning against her? Or were issues cropping up because of her journalistic writings (she was facing 53 defamation cases) at the time of her killing? And, finally, was there any threat from right-wing extremists and fundamentalist organisations that were unhappy with her criticism of Hindutva?

The SIT was lucky to have its first breakthrough in the case when material evidence recovered from the scene of crime was analysed at the Karnataka Forensic Science Laboratory. The forensic ballistic analysis established that the 7.65 mm pistol used to murder Gauri Lankesh was the same pistol that had been used to murder Kalburgi in Dharwad (Karnataka) and Govind Pansare in Kolhapur (Maharashtra). The SIT also learned valuable lessons from the findings in the 2009 Margao blast case.

The turning point

The arrest in February of K.T. Naveen Kumar was the turning point. He was picked up by the Central Crime Branch at Bengaluru’s Majestic bus terminus when he was in the illegal possession of 15 live .32 calibre cartridges. Naveen, who lives in Pandavapura taluk of Mandya district, was a known right-wing fanatic. His phone, along with that of a number of other right-wing elements, had been wire-tapped by the State and local intelligence. Naveen’s interrogation led to the arrest of his recruiter, Sujith Kumar, and from there it was a painstaking and carefully crafted step-by-step journey for the SIT as it unravelled how the crime was planned and executed.

The arrest of Virendra Tawade in June 2016 by the CBI in the course of its investigations into the Dabholkar case and the filing of a supplementary charge sheet by the Maharashtra SIT in November 2016 making him an accused in the Pansare case resulted in two things. The Pansare and Dabholkar murders were for the first time linked to the same group, and a replacement for him had to be found to lead the “crime syndicate”.

That role was filled by Amol Kale, also known as Bhai Sab or Sanjay Bansare, a resident of Pune. Other key members of the crime syndicate were Amit Degvekar, Vikas Patil alias Dada, and Rishikesh Deodikar. Vikas Patil recruited Sujith Kumar and Manohar Edave in order to carry out the recruitment of members in Karnataka. Sujith Kumar eventually recruited Parshuram Waghmore, the man who allegedly pumped the bullets into Gauri Lankesh, while Manohar Edave recruited Ganesh Miskin and Amit Baddi.

The planning

SIT officers told Frontline that the conspiracy to murder Gauri Lankesh was hatched in August 2016 at a meeting of the “crime syndicate”. The crime was meticulously planned: Amol Kale instructed one Nihal, also known as Dada, to obtain the addresses of Gauri Lankesh’s office and residence. He in turn assigned the job in January 2017 to H.L. Suresh, who after identifying the addresses of Gauri Lankesh’s office in Basavangudi and her residence in Rajarajeshwarinagar passed on the information to Amol Kale through Dada.

The SIT alleges that in October 2016, Amol Kale instructed Vasudev Suryavamshi, also called “Mechanic”, to steal a motorbike. A black Passion Pro motorbike was identified and stolen by “Mechanic” along with Sujith Kumar from a bylane in Davangere and handed over to Amol Kale.

In March/April 2017, Amol Kale instructed Amit Baddi and Ganesh Miskin to keep a watch on Gauri Lankesh’s movements. They visited Bengaluru several times in those two months and performed the task. They followed her to her residence and observed her movements to ascertain her daily routine. This was reported back to Amol Kale.

By May 2017, Amol Kale had tasked Manohar Edave to do a reconnaissance of the locality where Gauri Lankesh resided and to specifically find out the locations of CCTV cameras (code named “bulb”).

In June 2017, Amol Kale, Amit Degvekar and Dada reviewed the reconnaissance undertaken by Amit Baddi, Ganesh Miskin and Manohar Edave and finalised the routes to be taken by the motorbike-borne assassination squad. In the same month, several members of the syndicate were trained by Rajesh Bangera at a farmhouse owned by Bharat Kurne near Chikale village, Belagavi. In the first week of August 2017, Amol Kale, Amit Baddi, Ganesh Miskin, Parshuram Waghmore and Bharat Kurne met in the house of H.L. Suresh at Seegehalli in Bengaluru. The assassination team of Amit Baddi, Ganesh Miskin, Parshuram Waghmore and Bharat Kurne was finalised. Each member was individually allocated a specific task. Ganesh Miskin and Amit Baddi were made to practise and memorise the routes that they would take during the execution of the plan.

A few days later, Mohan Nayak took a house on rent near Tagachuguppe in Bengaluru’s Kumbalgodu located along the routes practised by the assassination team, on the pretext of running an acupuncture clinic. In the third week of August 2017, Amol Kale, Amit Baddi, Ganesh Miskin, Parshuram Waghmore, Bharat Kurne, Sharad Kalaskar, Shrikanth Pangarkar and Sudhanva Gondalekar met in a house rented by Bharat Kurne in Belagavi to make the final preparations and plan the operation. Bharat Kurne then took Ganesh Miskin, Parshuram Waghmore and Sharad Kalaskar to an isolated hilly region near Kinaye in Belagavi, where Parshuram and Ganesh Miskin practised shooting with countrymade pistols under the guidance of Sharad Kalaskar.

In early September 2017, Amol Kale and Dada procured and kept the bike, pistols, clothes and some food articles that were to be used by the assassination team at the Kumbalgodu house. H.L. Suresh vacated his house between September 2 and September 6, for use by Amol Kale and others. As per Amol Kale and Dada’s instructions, the assassination team came to Bengaluru the next day and stayed at the Kumbalgodu house.

On September 4, after arming themselves, Ganesh Miskin rode on the black motorbike with Parshuram Waghmore on the pillion to the residence of Gauri Lankesh to carry out the assassination. However, that night they were unsuccessful in carrying out the plan.

On September 5, another attempt was made. Like the previous day, Ganesh Miskin and Parshuram Waghmore armed themselves with pistols and left a little earlier and waited near Gauri Lankesh’s residence. It was between 8 p.m. and 8:10 p.m. when Gauri Lankesh returned home. It was when she stopped her car, got out and went towards the gate of her house that Parshuram Waghmore walked up and shot her four times, killing her instantly. The duo then escaped on the bike to the place where Amit Baddi was waiting, handed over their pistols, rounds (ammunition), clothes and helmets and went to the Kumbalgodu house. Bharat Kurne was waiting for them and dropped them off near Nelamangala toll gate, and they escaped individually.

Meanwhile, Amit Baddi took the articles in a Maruti Omni van and kept them at the designated spot in H.L. Suresh’s house and escaped. Ten days later, as per the directions of Amol Kale, Sudhanva Gondalekar and Amit Baddi came to Bengaluru and took back the bag containing the pistols and rounds and the bike. Both were handed over to Sharad Kalaskar in Belagavi separately.

According to the SIT, the assassination had been planned so well that many of the accused did not know more than their own designated roles.

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