New Delhi: Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah directed the state’s home secretary on Wednesday (December 6) to “take urgent steps” to expedite the trials in the M.M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh murder cases, the Hindustan Times reported.A special court is likely to be set up in Bengaluru to try both cases together, given that they involve common accused persons, The Hindu reported.Kalburgi, a Kannada author and rationalist, was shot dead outside his Dharwad home in 2015.Lankesh was a journalist-activist shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017.Kalburgi’s wife Umadevi and Lankesh’s sister Kavitha reportedly wrote to Siddaramaiah about the delay in the investigation into their relatives’ murders and requested that a special court be set up to hear the matters.In both cases, Siddaramaiah was quoted by the Hindustan Times as asking the home secretary to take “urgent steps” with regard to setting up a special court.The two were killed because of their ‘anti-Hindu’ views, a special investigation team (SIT) from Karnataka reportedly said in a chargesheet filed in 2018.At the time of her death, Lankesh’s weekly magazine had come under attack for her views against the communal politics of the Hindu nationalist ‘Sangh parivar’ in Karnataka.The Times of India cited sources as saying that a man who confessed to killing Lankesh said he was told to do so to “save his religion”.According to The Hindu, six out of 143 witnesses in Kalburgi’s case and 97 out of 530 witnesses in Lankesh’s case have been examined to date.With regard to Lankesh’s case, Siddaramaiah said in a letter to the state home secretary that the SIT has arrested 18 people so far, the Hindustan Times reported.“While the court had started the hearing in the case in July 2022, the case is progressing at a slow pace due to other cases pending before the court,” he reportedly noted.The SIT’s 2018 chargesheet reportedly also said that two others – rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare – were also killed for their ‘anti-Hindu’ views.In that same year, the Press Trust of India quoted a senior police official as saying that “a gang of like-minded people was involved in the killings of Dabholkar, Lankesh and Kalburgi.”“Almost all members of this gang have links with the Sanatan Sanstha and its offshoot Hindu Janjagruti Samiti,” the official also said.Earlier this year, the Supreme Court asked the Central Bureau of Investigation to look into whether there was an overarching conspiracy behind the killings of Dabholkar, Kalburgi, Pansare and Lankesh.The Hindu cited sources as saying that the process of setting up a special court with a full-time judge for the Kalburgi and Lankesh cases would take another month.A senior official told the newspaper that “the special court which will only hear [the] Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh cases on a daily basis will help in completing the trials in a matter of one-and-a-half years.”