The featured image above is one of the AP photos Pultizer has displayed in announcing award for three photographers in featured photography. The image by Dar Yasin shows women shouting slogans as Indian policemen fire teargas and live ammunition in the air to stop a protest march in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Friday, Aug. 9, 2019.
Three Associated Press photographers have won the Pulitzer prize in the feature photography category for their “striking images of life in the contested territory of Kashmir as India revoked its independence, executed through a communications blackout.”
Channi Anand, Mukhtar Khan and Dar Yasin who took some of the images defining excruciating situation in the disputed shared the prize.
Since New Delhi deprived the UN-recognized disputed region of its decades-old autonomy on August 5, 2019, Kashmir has been a major international story with intense military-enforced lock down, communication apartheid and arbitrary arrests of thousands of Kashmiri men and children.
The United Nations, Amnesty International and US Commission for International Religious Freedom are among the major organizations that have faulted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s radical BJP government for pursuing anti-Muslim in India and harsh policies in Kashmir in violation of fundamental human freedoms.
While announcing the prize, the Pulitzer also released a description of the works the three AP photographers have done professionally over the years.
Channi Anand is based in Jammu, a strategic location not far from the India-Pakistan border that experiences frequent cross border violence. Seeing people flee their homes has become routine but it still affects him each time he covers stories of displacement. He has followed political developments between the neighbors relentlessly for the Associated Press since 2000. He has also traveled to work on a story on Siachin Glacier, the highest battleground in the world. He lives with his wife and two children.
After more than two decades in the field, Channi now finds himself at home working on social issues, natural calamities, live encounters between security forces and terrorists or the extreme weather conditions that is harshest for the homeless.
Mukhtar Khan was born and brought up in the Indian portion of Kashmir, where he has lived all his life. In his over two-decade long career, he has extensively covered the region–following the Kashmir conflict on a daily basis, the 2005 earthquake that shook his region, stories between the nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan, along with other major stories that unfolds in his beat.
Through it all, Khan has focused on the daily life of war-torn Kashmir. He started working with the Associated Press in 2000 before joining the organization full-time in 2004. He won an Atlanta Photojournalism Award in 2015.
.@AP photographers Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan and Channi Anand have been awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in feature photography for extraordinary photojournalism of the crisis and military lockdown in Indian-controlled Kashmir. https://t.co/h0oRgAldpb
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 4, 2020
Dar Yasin, born in 1973, in Indian Kashmir. Studied bachelor’s in computer science and technology in South of India. Dar has extensively covered the Kashmir conflict, South Asia Earthquake and its aftermath, and the historical opening of the bus route between divided Kashmir.
On assignment in Afghanistan he has covered the Afghan War, Afghan Refugees and Daily life of war-torn Afghanis. Dar has also covered the Rohingya refugee crisis who fled large- scale violence and persecution in Myanmar. His works have appeared in all the major newspapers and news magazines around the globe.
