India, Sept. 5 -- The gate had barely creaked shut behind her car when the bike swerved in. It was September 5, 2017, Teachers' Day, of all days, and Gauri Lankesh, fifty-five years old, editor, dissenter, daughter of a man who'd built a newspaper out of defiance, was walking the last few steps to her own front door. She never made it inside. Three shots, maybe four. Head. Chest. She fell in the same lane she had walked home through a thousand times before, and this time she did not get up.

She ran Lankesh Patrike, the Kannada weekly her father P. Lankesh had founded as a platform for Dalits, women and the marginalised, and she carried that legacy forward with her own sharp, uncompromising voice. In its pages she was relentless on Hindut...