The trial in the Gauri Lankesh murder case, in which a chargesheet was filed in November 2018 against 17 accused people belonging to right-wing Hindutva groups, has now moved into the hands of a seventh judge.
On Tuesday, K S Bharath Kumar began conducting the trial after the transfer of the previous judge, M Chandrashekar Reddy, to a senior administrative role in the Karnataka High Court.
The new judge, who took charge of the principal district and sessions court in Bengaluru on June 1, began by recording the statement of a police constable, who is the 216th of 400 prosecution witnesses in the case.
The trial has been conducted daily since it started on July 4, 2022, even though the Special Investigation Team of the Karnataka police filed the chargesheet on November 23, 2018.
The new judge was earlier an administrator at the high court, and his predecessor also served in an administrative role in the Karnataka Lokayukta before being made the principal judge for the district of Bengaluru in November 2025, sources in the legal system said.
All other judges who previously conducted the trial in the case—S Amarannavar, Anil Katti, C M Joshi, Ramakrishna Huddar and B Muralidhar Pai—were elevated to the high court. When C M Joshi was the principal judge, a schedule for a speedy trial was assigned, with one week of continuous hearing conducted every month.
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 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 has stated that the journalist was killed by members of extremist right-wing groups that created a syndicate to carry out killings and attacks on Hindutva’s critics, primarily in Karnataka and Maharashtra, between 2013 and 2018.
This story was originally published in indianexpress.com. Read the full story here.
