CHANNI ANAND 
MUKHTAR KHAN 
DAR YASIN
WEB DESK
Three photographers from Jammu & Kashmir won prestigious Pulitzer for coverage after erstwhile state lost special status. Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan and Channi Anand won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for their “striking images of life” in Jammu and Kashmir after the Centre abrogated the territory’s special status under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution.
All the three are associated with news agency Associated Press
The Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in journalism, had been postponed for two weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic. Dana Canedy, who administers the awards, delivered the news from her living room via video-conference instead of a ceremony at Columbia University in New York.
The photographers captured images of protests, the police, paramilitary action and daily life in Jammu and Kashmir after phone and internet services were shut down in August last year, making it difficult for the world to gain access to the region.
“Snaking around roadblocks, sometimes taking cover in strangers’ homes and hiding cameras in vegetable bags…then headed to an airport to persuade travellers to carry the photo files out with them and get them to the AP’s office in New Delhi,” the news agency AP described the hurdles of reporting in a statement.
Channi Anand is based in Jammu, a strategic location not far from the India-Pakistan border that experiences frequent cross border violence. Seeing people flee their homes has become routine but it still affects him each time he covers stories of displacement. He has followed political developments between the neighbors relentlessly for the Associated Press since 2000.
After more than two decades in the field, Channi now finds himself at home working on social issues, natural calamities, live encounters between security forces and terrorists or the extreme weather conditions that is harshest for the homeless.
Mukhtar Khan was born and brought up in the Kashmir, where he has lived all his life. In his over two-decade long career, he has extensively covered the region–following the Kashmir conflict on a daily basis, the 2005 earthquake that shook his region, stories between the nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan, along with other major stories that unfolds in his beat.
Through it all, Khan has focused on the daily life of war-torn Kashmir. He started working with the Associated Press in 2000 before joining the organization fulltime in 2004.
Dar Yasin, born in 1973, in Kashmir. Studied bachelor’s in computer science and technology in South India. Dar has extensively covered the Kashmir conflict, South Asia Earthquake and its aftermath, and the historical opening of the bus route between divided Kashmir.
On assignment in Afghanistan he has covered the Afghan War, Afghan Refugees and Daily life of war-torn Afghanis. Dar has also covered the Rohingya refugee crisis who fled large- scale violence and persecution in Myanmar. His works have appeared in all the major newspapers and news magazines around the globe.