Gauri Lankesh Murder: Nine Years, 17 Accused and Still No Verdict

Gauri Lankesh was born in 1962, the daughter of the Kannada writer and editor P. Lankesh. She worked for English-language publications including The Times of India and Sunday magazine before returning to Bengaluru after her father’s death in 2000 to run his weekly, Lankesh Patrike. After a split with her brother she started her own edition, Gauri Lankesh Patrike, in 2005. Like her father’s paper, it carried no advertising.

Her writing attacked communalism, caste discrimination and Hindutva politics, and she backed Dalit and anti-caste movements. She also worked to bring Maoist insurgents back into the mainstream. She had critics and lawsuits, including a criminal defamation conviction in 2016 over a 2008 article, which she was appealing when she died. Her killing turned her into a national symbol of the dangers faced by outspoken journalists.

The SIT’s central claim is that the murder was not the act of a lone gunman but the work of a network that spent months planning it: recruiting and training members, scouting Lankesh’s house, arranging a weapon, a motorcycle and safe houses, and choosing the shooter. Investigators said diaries seized from Amol Kale pointed to that planning, and that the network had prepared to target other writers and activists it saw as hostile to its ideology. They linked its members to right-wing Hindutva groups, which have denied any role.

The accused deny the charges. Their lawyers have challenged the reliability of confessions, the diaries and witness statements, and several witnesses have retracted earlier accounts in court. Until the trial court rules, every person named below is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Within days of the murder, preliminary ballistic analysis suggested that the pistol used on Lankesh had been used two years earlier on Kalburgi. A state forensic laboratory report filed with the first chargesheet in 2018 confirmed it: the bullets and cartridges in both cases came from the same 7.65 mm country-made pistol. Investigators in Maharashtra and Karnataka also pointed to overlapping suspects between these cases and the Dabholkar and Pansare murders; Sharad Kalaskar, an accused in the Lankesh case, was convicted of Dabholkar’s murder in May 2024.

These links shaped the investigation, but they are not proof. A common weapon or a common suspect does not establish that the same people planned every killing. Each case must be proved separately on its own evidence, and of the four only the Dabholkar case has so far reached a verdict.

Most of the accused were arrested in 2018. By late 2023 they had spent five years in custody under an organised-crime law with stricter bail rules, while fewer than half of the prosecution’s witnesses had been heard. The High Court’s December 2023 order on Mohan Nayak, and the Supreme Court’s refusal to cancel it in August 2024, turned the delay itself into the main ground for release. Once some accused had bail, the others argued parity, and courts agreed. When Sharad Kalaskar was bailed in January 2025, no accused on trial remained in jail.

The bail orders say nothing about guilt. They reflect a constitutional principle that people cannot be held indefinitely without trial. The Supreme Court paired its August 2024 order with a direction to finish the trial quickly, a direction the record since then shows has not been met.

The case is heard by the Principal City Civil and Sessions Judge in Bengaluru, a post that has repeatedly been a stepping stone to the High Court. Five judges who handled the case were elevated, one moved to an administrative post, and each change brought a pause while the new judge took over a record running to thousands of pages. Reports in October 2026 said only seven hearings had been held in the previous four months.

The evidence has also proved fragile in places. At least three prosecution witnesses had turned hostile by May 2025, including a Belagavi man who had described attending arms-training camps, and police began perjury proceedings against one witness. A hostile witness weakens parts of a case without ending it: the court must still weigh all the evidence together.

For Lankesh’s family and colleagues, the question at the heart of the case is still open: who was responsible for her death, and can the prosecution prove it? For the accused, the same delay means years under charges that have not been tested to the end. Only a verdict can settle either side’s claim.