Indian-origin journalist Megha Rajagopalan has won the Pulitzer prize for the year 2021 along with two of her colleagues for her investigative report on China's mass detention camps. Rajagopalan is a senior correspondent for BuzzFeed News based in London. The awards were announced by Pulitzer Board on Friday.
Rajagopalan and her colleagues won the award in the international reporting category. The three journalists interviewed over two dozen former prisoners from the detention camps where millions of Uyghur Muslims and people from other minority groups were reportedly interned, also using satellite imagery and 3D architectural simulation to bolster their investigation.
Along with her colleagues Christo Buschek and Alison Killing, Rajagopalan built a database of 50,000 possible camp sites using which they were able to identify 260 detention centres. BuzzFeed says that Rajagopalan was the first person to visit an internment camp in 2017, even though China had denied the existence of such places back then. The news agency further says that Chinese government revoked her visa and ejected her from the country in an attempt to silence her. However, Rajagopalan continued her investigation out of London alongside her two colleagues.
After being denied entry in China Rajagopalan travelled to the neighbouring country of Kazakhstan where numerous Chines Muslim had sought refuge owing to the crackdown by the Chinese government. She located and interviews more than two dozen people who had been previously interned at detention camps across Xingjiang province.
" Throughout her reporting, Rajagopalan had to endure harassment from the Chinese government, which had persisted beyond forcing her to pack up her apartment in Beijing on short notice,” read the prize entry for the team, also revealing that the Chinese government even posted her personal information, which included her government identification number, on Twitter in an attempt to dissuade her.
Following her win, Rajagopalan tweeted, "Am so grateful to our team, to @BuzzFeedNews, @alexcampbell & the organizations that supported us. Most of all I'm grateful to ex-detainees who told us what happened to them inside Xinjiang's camps. The public owes much to their courage. Still much more work to be done."
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