The Importance of Bearing Witness

Aakar Patel

In the movie Mad Max Fury Road (2015), the warlord Immortan Joe has a large force of fighters who take pleasure in killing themselves for Joe. They see it as an honour and do so with pride and without hesitation. Before they launch themselves off their vehicles in a kamikaze leap at the opponent, they shout ‘Witness me!’, asking their comrades to observe their sacrifice.

‘Martyr’ is the Greek word for witness. The etymological dictionary says ‘martyr’ means ‘one who bears testimony to faith’ and, especially, ‘one who willingly suffers death rather than surrender his or her religious faith.’ The reference here is to the Christians in the pagan world of Rome a few centuries after the passing of Christ. They were unwilling to integrate into the polytheistic culture of the empire and rigidly held on to their core beliefs, even if that meant being tortured and executed. In the European and Arabic world, the word ‘martyr’ carries similar meaning.

Indians use the Arabic word ‘shaheed’ for martyr. Shaheed also means witness. The Muslim profession of faith (‘la ilaha illaAllah, Muhammadur rasul Allah’) is called the shahada. And so, to be a martyr is to bear testimony, to hold on to what one believes is the truth.

The journalist Gauri Lankesh was 55 in 2017 when she was killed by a man who waited for her outside her home in Bangalore. His face was covered by a helmet. He pulled out a handgun and shot her three times, the same number of rounds that entered another martyr on 30 January 1948. The cameras that Lankesh had installed, because she had known for some time that she was in mortal danger, captured the assassination. The trial to punish her killers continues.

An activist is defined as ‘one who advocates a doctrine of direct action’. The word ‘activist’, as we use it today, is quite recent and goes back only a century, to 1915 (also the year that Gandhi arrived from South Africa). It refers to Swedes who wanted their nation to give up its neutrality in World War I and side with Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Allies, France and Britain, and later the United States. Lankesh was not killed because she advocated direct action. She died because she bore witness.

Farmers’ protests in Delhi

No Room for Dissent

She came from a community called the Lingayats. This is a group of people whose origins go back about 800 years to a man who rejected caste and formed a sect. This group had factions, including some who adhered to the idea that the rejection of caste meant a rejection of the faith, and others who saw the community as part of the wider Hindu fold. Lankesh began to publish material that angered this latter group. The material was pulled from the community’s own sources and so was not the product of her opinion. And it is also the case that the community had within itself developed fractures, with some sides emphasizing exactly what she was saying. For instance, in the demand that the Lingayats be recognized as a minority and therefore be allowed to run their own institutions.

But faith is ossified in India and what she wrote and published became intolerable. It should be said here that politically, the Lingayat community has been solidly behind the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) for the last few decades. Any attempt to examine it rationally would result in a political backlash from the followers of Hindutva. This was also discovered by another individual who had worked on Lingayat literature for several years and was killed two years before Lankesh.

In 1989, following threats from the community against his writing examining some of the primary Lingayat texts, this man, M.M. Kalburgi, recanted. This was the same year that Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie and, reading the interviews and media coverage of the threats received by Kalburgi, it appears that India was more open to discussing such things then than it is today. Unable to carry on his work, Kalburgi said, ‘I did it to save the lives of my family. But I also committed intellectual suicide on that day.’

Actually, he did not. ‘I will never again pursue any research on Lingayat literature and Basava philosophy,’ he said, but he continued along his intellectual path. He was killed on 30 August 2015, by the same man, according to the police, who murdered Lankesh.

Two other independent thinkers and writers were martyred in our time because of their desire to hold on to the truth. One was Govind Pansare, a Marxist who wrote several books, most famously on Shivaji. This historical and factual portrayal offended those who insisted that the Maratha warrior only be seen in one light. Pansare was shot on 25 February 2015 near his house in Kolhapur by assailants on a motorcycle.

Two years before that, in August 2013, the rationalist and physician Narendra Dabholkar was shot by assailants on a motorcycle in Pune while he was out for his morning walk. ‘If I have to take police protection in my own country from my own people, then there is something wrong with me,’ an obituary in the Times of India quoted him as saying, ‘I’m fighting within the framework of the Indian Constitution and it is not against anyone, but for everyone.’

This is the spirit that informs all four of the people profiled here. They believed they were not doing anything wrong and that what they did was absolutely within the framework of the Constitution to further freedom and inquiry.

The four