Kashmiri journalist's CAA documentary nominated for Emmy Awards

Nomination of Vice News documentary India Burning for the Emmy Awards 2020 came as a sweet surprise to one of its producers, 28-year-old journalist from Kashmir, Ahmer Khan.

The documentary, which "investigates the growing fear that the nation's 200 million Muslims are being systematically targeted", was part of the series titled VICE. It was nominated under the Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special category. Although they didn’t win an award, the nomination in itself was a special moment for the entire team.

Ahmer Khan, along with a team from India, had led the production of the Assam segment of the documentary. This part of the 16-minute documentary tells the story of a Muslim labourer who was helping in the construction of a detention centre for people shifted out under the National Register of Citizens (NRC). It was also where his own mother, who had been excluded from the NRC list, could probably end up in the near future.

“I am just waiting to die," the labourer's mother, who has lived in India all her life, has been recorded as saying in the documentary.

Khan, in an interview with Mint, shared his experience of shooting the domentary. He said that the idea of reporting from Assam struck him on November last year when he decided to text a fellow journalist.

Last year, around November, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act was still a Bill. In Assam, the NRC process had already left the fate of nearly two million people hanging in the balance. As an act of dissent, protesters took to the streets in Assam and Tripura after the Bill was made into an Act on December 11, 2019.

After looking at the state of the people in Assam amid the ongoing protest, Khan said, "I felt like I was back home (in Kashmir). There was a curfew, killing of civilians, complete internet shutdown. One night, I couldn’t find any food to eat, even though I was at a hotel. There were stones being thrown everywhere, tear-gas shelling—no pellets though—there was aerial firing, the streets were burning."

He began tweeting whatever photographs he was taking and the stories he was covering. His reports on the CAA-NRC protests in Assam appeared in international media outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN and The Intercept.

It was when Khan had already spent almost two months in Assam, that he was hired to be part of the team that was shooting India Burning.

Recalling the journey in Assam and shooting at the detention centre, Khan said, "It was difficult to get to the detention centre. I would drive myself—we hired two cars. It was a difficult time for me personally but I knew I had to get up and do it. We even went inside a jail with hidden cameras, that didn’t make the final cut."

Ahmer Khan has many accolades to his name. Besides bagging the Emmy Awards 2020 nomination, he has won the Kate Webb Prize, which “honours journalists working in perilous or difficult conditions in Asia", and the Human Rights Press Awards (2020) for his coverage of Kashmir after August 5, 2019. His coverage of Kashmir had also featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, AFP, Time, Radio France, Al Jazeera and Vice News.

“I have seen trauma from a young age. Assam, for example, was a heartbreaking moment for me. Among the civilians who got killed was a child who was a music player—his father is an auto driver. In Kashmir, we are all suffering from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder. We can always connect with people living in such conflict zones," Khan said.