Anna Politkovskaya

Lore & Background

Anna Stepanovna Mazepa was born in New York City in 1958, the daughter of Ukrainian Soviet diplomats. She grew up mostly in Moscow, attended music school and trained figure skating, and graduated from Moscow State University's school of journalism in 1980. She married fellow student Alexander Politkovsky in 1978 and had two children. Her early journalistic work included internships at Izvestia and the in-house magazine of the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and she later worked as assistant chief editor of Obshchaya Gazeta from 1994 to 1999. From June 1999 to 2006, she wrote columns for Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper featuring critical investigative coverage of Russian affairs.

Her reporting from Chechnya made her national and international reputation. For seven years, she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence. She was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. She was poisoned while flying to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis and had to turn back for medical treatment. Her post-1999 articles about Chechnya were turned into books, and in 2004 she published Putin's Russia for a Western readership. She received numerous international awards from 2000 onwards.

Reader's Guide

Politkovskaya's significance lies in her persistent investigative reporting on the Second Chechen War and human rights abuses in Russia, despite facing intimidation, arrest, mock execution, and poisoning. Her work, published primarily in Novaya Gazeta, brought international attention to conditions in Chechnya and criticized the policies of Vladimir Putin and the Federal Security Service. Her murder on 7 October 2006, Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday, drew global condemnation. In 2014, five men were sentenced to prison for the murder, but it remains unclear who ordered or paid for the contract killing. Her legacy is that of a journalist who continued reporting under extreme personal risk, and her books and articles remain a record of the conflict and its civilian toll.

Did You Know?

• She was born in New York City to Ukrainian Soviet diplomats.
• She was subjected to a mock execution by Russian military forces in Chechnya.
• Three men were sentenced to prison for her murder in 2014, with a fourth also convicted, but the person who ordered the killing remains unknown.

From the Family Paper to a Rival Voice

Gauri Lankesh entered journalism through one of Karnataka's most respected regional publications. Born in Bangalore in 1962 to the poet-journalist P. Lankesh, she grew up in the orbit of his Kannada weekly, Lankesh Patrike. Her career began at The Times of India's Bangalore bureau, then took her to Delhi with her husband, Chidanand Rajghatta, before a nine-year stint at a Sunday magazine back in the city. By the time her father died in 2000, she had sixteen years in the newsroom, then covering stories for Eenadu's Telugu television channel in Delhi.

After the patriarch's death, Gauri and her younger brother Indrajit initially told the publisher they would discontinue the paper. Convinced otherwise, Gauri took the editorship while Indrajit handled business affairs. A slow ideological rift developed from 2001 onward and erupted publicly in February 2005. A report on a Naxalite attack on police, approved by Gauri, was withdrawn by Indrajit, who then filed a police complaint alleging she stole office equipment. Gauri lodged a counter-complaint claiming he threatened her with a revolver. After competing press conferences, she departed and launched her own weekly, Gauri Lankesh Patrike.

A Voice Against Hierarchy

Gauri Lankesh built her public identity around a fierce opposition to right-wing Hindu nationalism and caste-based social structures. In 2003 she spoke out against Sangh Parivar groups' attempts to assert Hindu control over the Sufi shrine at Baba Budan Giri. A decade later, at a protest in Mangalore demanding a ban on communal organisations, she described Hinduism not as a faith but as a hierarchical social system in which women are relegated to second-class status. She championed a minority-religion classification for the Lingayat community and led the Komu Souharda Vedike, a platform for oppressed communities, while arguing that followers of the philosopher Basavanna should not be categorised as Hindu.

Her press-freedom convictions led her to expose the misconduct of Congress leader D. K. Shivakumar and to write extensively about sexual-assault allegations against the head seer of Ramachandrapura Math, Raghaveshwara Bharati. She severed a thirty-five-year friendship with Prakash Belawadi when he joined the BJP as a media advisor ahead of the 2014 elections, and she publicly challenged the caste system at the 2015 Kannada literary conference, drawing a protest rally from the Hassan district Brahmin association.

Sued, Convicted, Undeterred

Throughout her career, Gauri Lankesh faced a steady stream of legal pressure that she attributed to her left-leaning editorial stance. In Dakshina Kannada district alone, three cases were registered against her, two of them defamation suits filed by Raghaveshwara Bharati over her reporting on his alleged rapes and sexual assaults.

The most prominent legal battle began on 23 January 2008, when her newspaper published an article titled "Darodegilada BJP galu," which alleged that three BJP workers—Umesh Dushi, Shivanand Bhat, and Venkatesh Mestry—had cheated a jeweller out of one lakh rupees, and that the jeweller had pressed the party's Member of Parliament, Pralhad Joshi, for repayment. Gauri said the story was sourced from within the BJP itself. Joshi and Dushi each filed separate defamation suits; in Dushi's case she was co-accused alongside the article's writer, Devanand Jagapur. Gauri maintained that the suits were politically motivated, pointing out that the same BJP leaders had not pursued defamation claims against other journalists who had written about them.

A Life Cut Short, a Legacy Enduring

On 5 September 2017, Gauri Lankesh was murdered outside her home in the Rajarajeshwari Nagar neighbourhood of Bangalore, ending a life defined by unapologetic advocacy. At the time of her death she was widely recognised as one of Karnataka's most vocal critics of right-wing Hindu extremism, a campaigner for women's rights, and a persistent opponent of caste-based discrimination.

In recognition of that body of work, she was honoured with the Anna Politkovskaya Award, named for the Russian journalist who was herself killed for her reporting. The award acknowledged Gauri's sustained efforts to challenge communal hatred, defend press freedom, and give voice to communities she saw as systematically marginalised. Her two newspapers—Lankesh Patrike, which she inherited, and the Gauri Lankesh Patrike she founded—remained the primary vehicles for that work, and her murder became a rallying point for journalists and civil-society groups across India who saw in her death the lethal cost of speaking against powerful ideological currents.

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