女记者遇害与印度政治的退化

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.

自上周以来，我的脑海中不住浮现一幅我希望自己从未见过的画面。那是一张照片，照片上是一位身材娇小的女作家。她留着剪得很短的灰白短发，穿着一件红蓝色的“沙瓦-克米兹”(salwar-kameez)，瘫躺在地上——她上周二在位于印度南部城市班加罗尔的家的前门廊遭袭击者开枪射杀。

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.

接着还有几乎同样令人不安的另一幕。一个富有魅力的年轻印度电视主持人在Twitter上幸灾乐祸地称，刺客的子弹让直言不讳的55岁作家兼活动家高里?兰凯什(Gauri Lankesh)闭上了嘴。“这样，共产主义者高里?兰凯什被无情地谋杀了。他们说，有施必有报。阿门，”Jagrati Shukla在Twitter上写道。该推文被点赞并转发了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”.

这两个画面反映了当代印度令人不安的一面。在印度，公民辩论和公众异议的空间正在迅速萎缩。最高法院律师、印度前总检察长（1998年至2004年）索利?索拉伯吉(Soli Sorabjee)称上周的杀戮为“对民主的谋杀”。

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.

对记者而言，印度一直是一个危险之地，尤其是那些挖掘地方权力掮客（包括政客、商人，甚至精神领袖）不当行为的小城市记者们。根据保护记者委员会(Committee to Protect Journalists)的数据，自1992年以来，已有41名记者在印度遇害，且几乎都发生在小城市或者克什米尔这样的冲突地区。