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Raksha Kumar is a multimedia journalist focusing on human rights, politics and social injustices. Since 2011, she has reported for The New York Times, BBC, Guardian, TIME, South China Morning Post, Foreign Policy, Scroll.in and The Hindu.
In March 2018, she was awarded the National Foundation for India Media Award for her reportage on land rights in India. In 2017, she was shortlisted for Kurt Schork Memorial Awards in International Journalism. For her work on land conflicts in India, she was awarded the Chameli Devi Award for Outstanding Media Personality in 2016.
As a reporter, her focus areas are land and forest rights of the most vulnerable communities. However, since these issues cannot be looked at in isolation, Raksha found herself increasingly reporting on armed conflict around resource extraction in places like Chhattisgarh and Kashmir.
In 2015, she wrote, shot and directed a documentary film on Rationalists in Contemporary India. It was aired by India's public broadcaster, Doordarshan. The film has been screened in 29 locations across the country until now.
The same year, Raksha was selected as a Chevening Fellow by the University of Westminster to research on Hindu Right in the UK. This helped Raksha build on her post graduate dissertation which was on Hindu Fundamentalists in India.
With a Fulbright Scholarship for Leadership Development, she went to the Columbia University in New York City to pursue a Masters in Science. As a student, she was offered the Scripps Howard Fellowship to report from Israel and the West Bank. Since 2011, Raksha has reported from 11 countries across the world.
Raksha worked as an editor at NDTV, leading English news channel in India. She was the editorial head of a two-hour prime time news show, where she lead a team of about 20 junior journalists.
A graduate of Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, Raksha was a dedicated student and a passionate public speaker.
Acknowledging The ‘Question Of Self-Determination’ In Kashmir
This month, the United Nation's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released its first-ever report on alleged human rights violations in Indian administered and Pakistani administered Kashmir.
This sent the Indian establishment into a tizzy, as it has always looked at its part of Kashmir as an integral part of the Indian Union. However, this report needs some decoding for the uninitiated and this piece does a fantastic job of it.
Beyond the details of its well-evidenced account of the egregious human rights violations and denial of constitutional rights that respectively characterise the region’s two separate sovereign jurisdictions—Indian and Pakistani administered Jammu & Kashmir, the United Nations Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report displaces of our entrenched sense of cartographic and national certainties.
The OHCHR report calls for the governments of India and Pakistan to respect the right of self-determination as protected under international law. However, India has expressed reservation on Article 1 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, which proclaims the right to self-determination as the right of a people. This piece, as it claims, is:
an invitation to explore a roadmap—a journey towards legal processes and democratic mechanisms for truce, peace and transitional justice that will undoubtedly be complex, but one that could strive to be inclusive and under international law.
