Indian-origin scribe Megha Rajagopalan wins Pulitzer Prize for exposing China’s secret mass internment camps

Indian-origin journalist Megha Rajagopalan has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize along with two other contributors for innovative investigative reports that exposed a vast infrastructure of prisons and mass internment camps secretly set up by China for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its Xinxiang region.

Rajagopalan, who is BuzzFeed News, is among two Indian-origin journalists who won the prestigious prize. Tampa Bay Times’s Neil Bedi won the prize for local reporting while Kathleen McGregory is another recipient who won the prize for reporting a series exposing a sheriff’s office initiative that used computer modelling to identify people believed to be future crime suspects. About 1,000 people were monitored under the programme, including children. “What Kathleen and Neil unearthed in Pasco County has had a profound impact on the community,” Mark Katches, Times executive editor, said. “This is what the best investigative journalism can do and why it is so essential.”

Rajagopalan's Xinjiang series won the Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting category. In 2017, Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp — even though China denied that such places existed, BuzzFeed News said. “In response, the government tried to silence her, revoking her visa and ejecting her from the country,” BuzzFeed News said in its entry for the prize. “It would go on to cut off access to the entire region for most Westerners and stymie journalists. The release of basic facts about detainees slowed to a trickle.” Working from London, Rajagopalan refused to be silent and partnered with two contributors, Alison Killing, a licensed architect who is specialised in forensic analysis of architecture and satellite images of buildings, and Christo Buschek, a programmer who builds tools for data journalists. “The blazing Xinjiang stories shine desperately needed light on one of the worst human rights abuses of our time,” said Mark Schoofs, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. Soon after winning the prize, Rajagopalan told BuzzFeed News that she wasn’t expecting to win and got the good news when Schoofs called her to congratulate her on the victory.