In the years since the reporting I did in Gujarat, I have received many death threats and threatening phone calls. Anonymous letters have been delivered to my home. In these letters, faceless, nameless men (they must have been men because these sorts seem always to be men) claimed that they knew where my children went to school, that they had been following me, that after Gauri Lankesh, who had been murdered in Bangalore, it was now my turn.
Between 2010 and 2014, and then again between 2017 and 2018, I lived with round-the-clock security cover, provided on both occasions on the recommendation of the Supreme Court-appointed SIT. I was told by the police personnel who protected me to never follow a predictable routine, to leave home at a different time every day and to avoid taking the same road daily.
Worse than having to live with a Damoclean sword hanging over my head, was living with the bestial stories I had heard from these men. The images of children being…