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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.
In The Name Of Religion: Rape And Murder Of A Minor Girl
A minor girl was repeatedly gang raped. She was then killed, and her body was crushed with stones before being dumped in the forests in the Kathua region of Jammu & Kashmir, a north Indian state.
This story places her horrific rape in context. Persecution of Muslims in the state by militant Hindu groups based in Jammu has a long and tragic history. Speaking to many stakeholders, including the truck drivers who ply the Jammu-Srinagar highway, the story tracks the horrors of religious persecution in the state.
Incidentally, Jammu & Kashmir is the only Muslim majority state in India. Therefore, fundamentalist groups in the country have tried to establish their supremacy over the state in many ways — including violence.
Starting from 1947, when India was decolonised, this rich state has barely seen an extended period of peace.
After the anti-Muslim violence in 1947, many Muslims of Kathua migrated to Doda and other areas. With the result, 43 Muslim majority villages turned into ghost towns overnight. Among them, 31 were completely depopulated.
It becomes important to place the recent rape and murder of the girl on a continuum of four decades of violence. This story pieces together such a sequence of events in history.
