Srinagar: Associated Press news agency’s Kashmir photographers, Dar Yasin, Channi Anand and Mukhtar Khan have won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize-2020 for covering the unprecedented crackdown and communication blackout by the government of India in the region after the abrogation of article 370 last year.
The trio has won the prize in feature photography category. While Yasin and Mukhtar are based in Srinagar, Anand is a resident of Jammu district.
The winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prize were announced virtually on Monday Pulitzer board administrator Dana Canedy
unlike the usual ceremony at Columbia University in the US in view of the prevailing COVID-19 lockdown.

A statement by the sponsors on their website said the Kashmiri photographers were selected for their “striking images of life” in the disputed Himalayan territory.

The AP’s president and CEO Gary Pruitt told news website ‘Aljazeera’ that the trio’s work was “important and superb”.

“Thanks to the team inside Kashmir, the world was able to witness a dramatic escalation of the long struggle over the region’s independence.,” Pruitt said.
Over the predicament of working under the last year’s unprecedented restrictions and communication blockade, Yasin told the news site in an e-mail, “It was always cat-and-mouse,” Yasin recalled on Monday in an email. “These things made us more determined than ever to never be silenced.”

Anand said the award left him speechless. “I was shocked and could not believe it,” he said.

Reader correspondent