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.

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. 

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”.