Gauri Lankesh murder: Seven years on, prosecution to cite Supreme Court order to speed up trial

Currently, the trial is held for one week every month. However, according to sources, the prosecution intends to request that the trial be held for at least two weeks each month to comply with the Supreme Court’s order on August 20 for a speedy trial.

While the SIT investigating the case requested establishing a special court for daily trial proceedings in December 2023, the request is still pending with the Karnataka High Court.

“The trial can, however, be expedited in the special Karnataka Control of Organized Crimes Act (KCOCA) court, where it is currently being conducted in light of the Supreme Court order. The trial can be held for two weeks every month instead of the current routine of hearing evidence for a week every month,” sources in the state prosecution said.

The prosecution has largely conducted the trial in a tight manner, with only two witnesses, who were recruited to be part of the right-wing crime syndicate’s training programmes, turning hostile during the trial. However, several accused in the case have used the delay in the conduct of the trial to seek bail.

Supreme Court order on August 20

On August 20, the Supreme Court dismissed two separate petitions filed by the Karnataka government and Kavitha Lankesh, the sister of Gauri Lankesh, seeking the cancellation of bail granted to a key accused arrested for providing logistical support for the murder.

The accused Mohan Nayak was granted bail by the Karnataka High Court on December 7, 2023, citing the delay in the conduct of the trial in the case and the incarceration of Nayak for nearly five years after his arrest in August 2018. Nayak was the first of the 17 accused arrested in the case since 2018 to be granted bail.

Since the grant of bail to Nayak in 2023, three more accused have received bail in the murder case in the Karnataka High Court on the grounds of the delay in the trial.

During the hearing in the Supreme Court, the senior counsel appearing for Karnataka told the court that the prosecution had examined 137 of 527 witnesses. 137 witnesses were dropped, and another 150 were likely to be dropped, leaving only about 100 witnesses to be examined in the trial.

“Under the circumstances, we are not inclined to interfere with the impugned orders passed by the high court. However, it is directed that the trial court shall expeditiously conduct the trial, and all the parties shall cooperate with the trial court in concluding the trial,” the Supreme Court bench comprising Justice Bela Trivedi and Justice Satish Chandra Sharma said.

First of 17 accused got bail in December 2023

Mohan Nayak was arrested in July 2018 by a Karnataka SIT and has been under trial since July 2022. Witnesses identified him during the trial as the man who rented out a house in the Thagachaguppe village near the Kumbalgodu area of west Bengaluru that was allegedly used by the shooters in the murder as a hideout before executing the killing.

Nayak’s phone number was also identified as the one used to communicate with the house owner to rent out the house in August 2017 on the pretext of running an Ayurvedic clinic and a subsequent decision soon after the murder to give up the house.

Previously, the bail pleas of Nayak, who is also accused of providing logistics like mobile phone SIM cards to the accused, had been rejected by the high court and district courts, while the Supreme Court in October 2021 overturned a decision of the high court to drop KCOCA charges.

In the high court plea in which he was granted bail in December 2023, Nayak argued that there were 527 chargesheet witnesses, only 90 of whom had been examined until then, and that “the chances of trial being completed in the immediate near future are not there.”

The Karnataka SIT argued in the courts that much of the delay in the trial was linked to frequent applications filed by the accused themselves and due to the Covid crisis in 2020 and 2021.

The SIT probe led to Nayak after his phone number was found in the diary of Amol Kale – a former Hindu Janajagruti Samiti activist – accused of running the syndicate linked to the shooting of Lankesh and three other critics of Hindutva between 2013 and 2018 – Narendra Dabholkar, 69; Govind Pansare, 81, in Maharashtra; and M M Kalburgi, 77, in Karnataka.

Gauri Lankesh murder case – a timeline

Gauri Lankesh was shot dead outside her home in west Bengaluru on the night of September 5, 2017, by two motorcycle-borne assassins identified later by the SIT as Parashuram Waghmore, 26, a former member of the Sri Rama Sena in Bijapur, and Ganesh Miskin, 27, a right-wing activist from Hubbali.

The SIT of the Karnataka Police arrested and charged 17 people linked to extremist Hindutva groups who created a syndicate to carry out killings and attacks on critics – primarily in Karnataka and Maharashtra, between 2013 and 2018.

“The members of this organisation targeted persons who they identified to be inimical to their belief and ideology. The members strictly followed the guidelines and principles mentioned in “Kshatra Dharma Sadhana”, a book published by Sanatan Sanstha,” the SIT said after it filed a chargesheet against the accused in the case on November 23, 2018.

Amith Degwekar, H L Suresh and K T Naveen Kumar, alleged members of an organised right-wing crime syndicate, who were arrested in 2018, are three others who have been granted bail so far.

While Degwekar is accused in multiple right-wing linked extremism cases in Karnataka and Maharashtra, the others are only linked to the Gauri Lankesh murder.

Degwekar, Suresh and Naveen Kumar were associated with the radical Hindutva group Sanatan Sanstha and its affiliate Hindu Janajagruti Samiti in Goa and Karnataka.

The courts in Bengaluru are hearing the bail pleas of three others: Amit Baddi, Bharat Kurne, and Manohar Yadave.