As the ecosystem grovelling over three photojournalists in the Jammu and Kashmir were declared the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for their “striking images of life” which show people affected by operations of Indian security forces, brave Indian soldiers continue to lose their lives to terrorists, reports that don’t get any international award.
While the images made certain problematic assertions that eventually made the Indian army evil forces and the terrorists and stone pelters as common protestors, the Senior Superintendent of Police of Jammu and Kashmir Imtiyaz Hussain came up with a contradicting idea. He tweeted a photo of the grief-stricken young daughter of a cop killed by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir.
This picture should haunt the conscience of humanity for times to come. An inconsolable daughter of a police officer martyred in 2017 in Kashmir.
— Imtiyaz Hussain (@hussain_imtiyaz) May 6, 2020
Any awards for this photograph? pic.twitter.com/TJwpZCPaF7
He wrote, “This picture should haunt the conscience of humanity for times to come. An inconsolable daughter of a police martyred in 2017 in Kashmir. Any awards for this photograph?”
The picture Imtiyaz Hussain tweeted is of Zohra who was 5 years old when her father Abdul Rashid was killed due to Pakistan Sponsored terrorism in 2017. Rashid was an Assistant sub-inspector in Jammu and the Kashmir police. The photographs of Zohra had gone viral at that time, but they were not considered worthy of any photography award as noted by Imtiyaz Hussain, because they do not fit the narrative.
The picture tweeted by Hussain went viral on social media but unfortunately failed to grab the sympathy from the left lobby which is still busy in normalizing Pakistan sponsored terrorism and putting different allegations on the armed forces.
Pulitzer Prize for glorifying Terrorism
The featured photos that won the so-called prestigious Pulitzer Prize did best to glorify the Pakistan sponsored terrorism in Kashmir valley, maligning the image of India with some problematic assertions like ‘India occupied Kashmir’. Announcing the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography section, the official Pulitzer website referred to Kashmir as an ‘independent” state and a “contested territory of India”, adding that Kashmir’s “independence” was revoked by India through a “communications blackout”.
One of the photos that won the Pulitzer Prize showed a placard raised by a man that read “We dream of Independent Kashmir”, and echoed Pakistan’s stance over Kashmir by describing the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir as “Indian controlled Kashmir”.
Another award winning photo showed a large number of masked protesters with the Pakistani flag in the background. The photo was clicked by Dar Yasin, captioned India’s Jammu and Kashmir as “Indian controlled Kashmir”.
In another picture, a Kashmiri stone-pelter attacking a convoy vehicle of the police is shamefully normalized as a “protester” who is merely throwing stones during a protest in “Indian controlled Kashmir”. It may be that a stone is seen in the hand of the person in the Pulitzer winning photo, and the website mentions this fact in the caption of the photo, but still labels him as a protester and not as a rioter or attacker.
