女記者遇害與印度政治的退化

I have been haunted since last week by an image that I wish I had never seen. It is a photo of a petite female writer, with close cropped grey hair and clad in a red and blue salwar-kameez, splayed on the ground, after assassins shot her to death last Tuesday on the front porch of her home in the southern Indian city of Bangalore.

自上週以來，我的腦海中不住浮現一幅我希望自己從未見過的畫面。那是一張照片，照片上是一位身材嬌小的女作家。她留着剪得很短的灰白短髮，穿着一件紅藍色的“沙瓦-克米茲”(salwar-kameez)，癱躺在地上——她上週二在位於印度南部城市班加羅爾的家的前門廊遭襲擊者開槍射殺。

And then there is a second image, almost as disturbing. It is of a glamorous young Indian television anchor gloating on Twitter that Gauri Lankesh, the feisty 55-year-old writer and activist, had been stilled by assassin’s bullets. “So, Commy Gauri Lankesh has been murdered mercilessly. Your deeds always come back to haunt you they say. Amen,” Jagrati Shukla wrote in a tweet liked and shared more than 2,000 times.

接着還有幾乎同樣令人不安的另一幕。一個富有魅力的年輕印度電視主持人在Twitter上幸災樂禍地稱，刺客的子彈讓直言不諱的55歲作家兼活動家高裏?蘭凱什(Gauri Lankesh)閉上了嘴。“這樣，共產主義者高裏?蘭凱什被無情地謀殺了。他們說，有施必有報。阿門，”Jagrati Shukla在Twitter上寫道。該推文被點贊並轉發了2000多次。

This diptych is a disturbing reflection of contemporary India, where space for civil debate and public dissent is shrinking rapidly. Soli Sorabjee, a Supreme Court lawyer and India’s attorney-general from 1998 until 2004, called last week’s slaying “the murder of democracy”.

這兩個畫面反映了當代印度令人不安的一面。在印度，公民辯論和公衆異議的空間正在迅速萎縮。最高法院律師、印度前總檢察長（1998年至2004年）索利?索拉伯吉(Soli Sorabjee)稱上週的殺戮爲“對民主的謀殺”。

India has long been a risky place for journalists, especially small-town reporters digging into the improprieties of local power brokers, including politicians, businessmen or even spiritual leaders. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 41 reporters have been killed in India since 1992, nearly all in small towns or conflict zones like Kashmir.

對記者而言，印度一直是一個危險之地，尤其是那些挖掘地方權力掮客（包括政客、商人，甚至精神領袖）不當行爲的小城市記者們。根據保護記者委員會(Committee to Protect Journalists)的數據，自1992年以來，已有41名記者在印度遇害，且幾乎都發生在小城市或者克什米爾這樣的衝突地區。