Indian-origin journalists win Pulitzer prize

Megha Rajagopalan, an Indian-origin journalist, along with her two contributors, has won the Pulitzer Prize for innovative investigative reports that exposed a vast infrastructure of prisons and mass internment camps secretly built by China for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its restive Xinjiang region.

Rajagopalan from BuzzFeed News is among two Indian-origin journalists who won the U.S. top journalism award on 11th June. Neil Bedi of the Tampa Bay Times won for local reporting, while Rajagopalan won the Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting category. In 2017, Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp where China began to detain thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang.

The Chinese government tried to silence her, revoking her visa and ejecting her from the country. Rajagopalan partnered with two contributors – Alison Killing, a licensed architect specialising in forensic analysis of architecture and satellite images of buildings, and Christo Buschek, a programmer who builds tools tailored for data journalists. Rajagopalan responded to her win by saying she was in complete shock.