Gauri Lankesh murder case: SC issues notice to accused in Karnataka government’s plea against his bail

The Karnataka government had last month filed a plea against the high court’s bail order. The Supreme Court earlier in December had also admitted a plea filed by Gauri Lankesh’s sister Kavitha against the grant of bail to Nayak.

Nayak was arrested in July 2018 by a Karnataka special investigation team (SIT) and has been under trial since July 2022. He has been identified by witnesses as the man who rented out a house in the Thagachaguppe village near the Kumbalgodu area of west Bengaluru that was allegedly used as a hideout by the shooters before executing the killing.

Nayak’s phone number was also identified as the one that was used to communicate with the house owner to rent 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 phones and SIM cards to the accused, had been rejected by the high court and district courts while the Supreme Court in October 2021 overturned a high court decision to drop Karnataka Control of Organised Crimes Act charges.

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

The Karnataka SIT has argued in the courts in the past 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 investigation 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 covert operation to kill Gauri Lankesh and three other critics of Hindutva between 2013 and 2018.

The Gauri Lankesh murder

Journalist Gauri Lankesh, 55, an outspoken critic of right-wing Hindutva, was shot dead outside her home in west Bengaluru on the night of September 5, 2017, by two motorcycle-borne assassins identified by the SIT as Parashuram Waghmore, 26, a former member of Sri Rama Sena in Bijapur, and Ganesh Miskin, 27, a right-wing activist from Hubbali.

The SIT 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 2013-2018. “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.