Senior Indian journalist gunned down outside her home

A senior Indian journalist was gunned down on Tuesday in the southern city of Bangalore by unidentified assailants, police said. 

Gauri Lankesh, 55, the editor and publisher of the Kannada language Gauri Lankesh Patrike, was shot by unidentified assailants near her home in the southern city.

For more, TRT World spoke with Neha Poonia in New Delhi.

Colleagues protest Lankesh's murder

Indian journalists and rights activists on Wednesday protested her murder, amid growing concerns about freedom of the press at a time of rising nationalism and intolerance of dissent.

The identity and motivations of her killers were not known, police said.

Several journalist groups, including the Editors' Guild, Press Club of India and Press Association, held protests across India, calling the murder a "brutal assault on the freedom of the press."

She was a critic of the federal government and wrote extensively about secularism.

She was found guilty in November 2016 of defaming lawmakers from the governing Bharatiya Janata Party in a 2008 story – a case she said was politically motivated, vowing to challenge her conviction in higher court.

"Journalism is nothing without courage. Democracy is nothing without dissent. Lankesh had plenty of both," said Shekhar Gupta, an Indian journalist and political commentator.

While the motivation for the killing was not immediately clear, political leaders,  journalists and activists took to Twitter to express their outrage and denounce intolerance and any threat to free speech.     

Karnataka state's chief minister Siddaramaiah called it an "assassination on democracy."

String of killings

Lankesh's murder was the latest in a string of deadly attacks targeting journalists and critics of Hindu nationalist politics, and critics of religious superstition, stoking worries about the rise of extremism and intolerance in the secular South Asian democracy.     

In 2015, scholar Malleshappa M Kalburgi was shot dead at his Bangalore home, following death threats from right-wing Hindu groups after he criticised idol worship and superstitious beliefs by Hindus.

Earlier that year, Indian writer and anti-superstition crusader Govind Pansare was shot dead while taking a walk with his wife near their home in western Maharashtra state. 

And in another daytime attack in 2013, two assailants shot anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar dead while he was out for a walk in the Maharashtra city of Pune.

Lankesh's brother said he hoped the culprits would be found and prosecuted.

"I do not know how to react. The assailants should be brought to book," he said, according to Press Trust of India.

Press freedom under threat

Lankesh's murder is a new low in India's track record in recent years of protecting journalists. The South Asian nation of 1.3 billion people slipped three places to 136th in this year's World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders.

The group said Hindu nationalists, on the rise since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party swept to power in 2014, were "trying to purge all manifestations of anti-national thought."

The Committee to Protect Journalists has said that there have been no convictions in any of the 27 cases of journalists murdered in India because of their work since 1992.