Megha Rajagopalan is an American journalist of Indian origin. Associated with BuzzFeed News, she gained popularity for having won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in the year 2021. Her writings include gripping tales of detained Muslim Uighurs in China. The report made waves, making a scathing comment on how 24 former detainees were treated by the government, which was very suggestive of the rampant extrajudicial malpractices that were going on unchecked. Her writings told compelling and gripping stories leading to expose the wrongs that were green-lighted by the Chinese government towards the detained Muslims.
Early life
Megha Rajagopalan was born in the winter of 1968 in Maryland, Washington DC to Indian parents. This feisty journalist, who has spent most of her life abroad is a hard-core linguist. At 31, she is as fluent a speaker in Tamil as she is in Mandarin!
Education
Megha Rajagopalan completed her college education from the University of Maryland College Park with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in her kitty. In the year 2019, she was selected as an Asia 21 young leader. She completed her graduation in the year 2008 from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Previously, she has been a Fulbright fellow in Beijing and a research fellow at the New America foundation situated in Washington DC.
Career as a journalist
Megha Rajagopalan is an award-winning international senior correspondent working with BuzzFeed News in London. In her career as a journalist, she has worked as a staff correspondent in China, Israel, Thailand, and Palestinian territories. Her previous experiences also include having worked as a political correspondent for Reuters in China. Also in the Middle East, she acquired experience by reporting on North Korea's nuclear crisis. It might befuddle you to know that she has worked as a reporter in around 23 countries in Asia! Finally, in the year 2018, she became the first journalist to gain entry into an internment camp for Uighur Muslims in far western China.
Megha Rajagopalan's rise to fame
Megha Rajagopalan rose to fame on 11th June 2021, after she was announced as the winner of the coveted Pulitzer Prize. The committee credited her work that exposed the Chinese government for imprisoning hundreds of Muslims in the Xinjiang region in secretly held mass internment camps. Her work is blazing evidence of the worst possible kind of human rights abuses in the 21st century. Because of her work around the internment camp in China, she was also conferred with the Human Rights Press Award in the year 2018.
How Megha Rajagopalan managed to expose China's secret detainment camps
Megha Rajagopalan and her colleagues started working on satellite images and 3D architectural simulations to capture interviews with two dozen former prisoners from the internment camps in China. China had initially denied the existence of such places and in an attempt to silence her, they had revoked her visa and forced her to leave the country. Following that, she joined hands with two other colleagues, named Alison Killing and Christo Buschek, who had extended their interest in the project and together they recommenced the mission from London. They began with analyzing the satellite images that were captured in the Xinjiang region to identify the exact locations of the detained Uighur, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. Then they undertook an exercise of comparison between the censored images from China with the uncensored ones. This exercise led them to develop massive data comprising around 50,000 locations where the detainees were held. Most of the discovered sites were large enough to hold around at least 10,000 people. They also found out those factories that had imprisoned labourers for a long time. After a lot of challenges, they managed to gain the trust of 24 prisoners from the Xinjiang camps and helped them in opening up and sharing their narratives with her, which were eventually published.
Megha Rajagopalan and the Pulitzer prize
Megha Rajagopalan was the first journalist to write an expose` on the internment camps in the Xinjiang region in China. She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her in-depth report that bore the testimonies of several former prisoners and refugees from the camp who shared first-hand accounts of their disturbing experiences. She won the Pulitzer Prize under the category of innovative investigative reports. Since Megha Rajagopalan has worked closely with two of her colleagues, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek, the Pulitzer Prize was shared amongst the three journalists. It was also the very first Pulitzer win for BuzzFeed News that was established in the year 2014.
Other awards
Below listed are some of the most prestigious awards that Rajagopalan has won in her lifetime:
· Human Rights Press Award in the year 2018
· Mirror Award for unearthing associations between Facebook and religious violence going on in Sri Lanka in the year 2019,
Megha Rajagopalan's list of the winning work
Her winning works include the following:
· China Secretly Built a Vast New Infrastructure to Imprison Muslims
· What They Saw: Ex-Prisoners Detail the Horrors of China’s Detention Camps
· Blanked-Out Spots on China’s Maps Helped Us Uncover Xinjiang’s Camps
· Inside a Xinjiang Detention Camp
· We Found the Factories Inside China’s Mass Internment Camps
· A Uighur Woman Who Was at Risk of Being Forcibly Sent Back to China And Detained Has Arrived Safely In The US
Why Megha Rajagopalan is an inspiration
The journey of Megha Rajagopalan is inspirational because of the way she braves danger, battles bureaucratic red-tapism and brute forces and yet emerge victorious and triumphant. Her flair for reporting difficult stories and working on challenging cases are virtues that make her a role model and ideal inspiration for budding journalists. Remember, it was her courage and unputdownable grit that had motivated her to throw light on the atrocities inflicted upon the prisoners in China – a story that was difficult to report and hard for readers to relate to. These indefatigable qualities in her will continue to motivate young minds, especially the ones who want to explore the daunting career of a journalist.
How you can be the next Megha Rajagopalan
Are you getting goosebumps after having read the adventurous and action-packed journey of Megha Rajagopalan? If the answer is yes, then it surely means that the inspiration bug has already bitten you and you want to tread the same path that the young Pulitzer winner has walked on. She is a role model for so many young and aspiring journalists. So, if you too want to be like her, do be determined and fearless in life. It is important to have faith in yourself, your capabilities, and your dreams. You need not only work as hard as she did, but also have her brand of mental stamina and grit to fight life-threatening situations, along with strong intuitive and investigative skills. Finally, try to learn from her sense of empathy in trying to comprehend others’ plights and putting those emotions into moving words for readers all around the world to relate to. Start with improving your reading and writing skills as well as your overall approach to life and the world around you.
Conclusion
Megha Rajagopalan has made India proud with her stellar work on the plight of the Uighur Muslims highlighting the monstrosities they had to face in China. The way she uncovered the nefarious internment camps in Xinjiang province was indeed a groundbreaking discovery that enlightened the entire world about the brutality with which the detainee Muslims are treated in the prisons of China.
FAQ - Interesting, fun, unknown facts about the Megha Rajagopalan
· Megha Rajagopalan's work has been included in the academic syllabus at Columbia and New York Universities.
· Her work has been translated into seven languages.
· She was displaced in China, after which she went to Kazakhstan where many other Chinese Muslims had moved too.
· Her work was anthologised in the year 2018 collection entitled ‘What Future: The Year’s Best Writing on What’s Next for People, Technology, and the Planet’.