'India's attack on free speech'

From Sonia Faleiro in the New York Times:

In today's India, secular liberals face a challenge: how to stay alive.

In August, 77-year-old scholar M. M. Kalburgi, an outspoken critic of Hindu idol worship, was gunned down on his own doorstep. In February, the communist leader Govind Pansare was killed near Mumbai. And in 2013, the activist Narendra Dabholkar was murdered for campaigning against religious superstitions. …

Earlier this month, a leader of the Sri Ram Sene, a Hindu extremist group with a history of violence including raiding pubs and beating women they find inside, ratcheted up the tensions. He warned that writers who insulted Hindu gods were in danger of having their tongues sliced off. …

I'm not sure how "liberal" communists—even India's communists—are, and I can't speak more broadly about the criticisms of India's politics in the Times essay. But the incidents that the opinion article cites are very troubling.