Mumbai Photojournalist’s photo series on Rohingya refugee wins Pulitzer Prize

NEW DELHI: Danish Siddiqui, a Mumbai based photographer along with the Reuters team won Pulitzer prize for feature photography documenting images of the Rohingya refugee crisis.

The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States.

One of Danish Siddiqui’s images depicts a despondent woman, about to collapse on a beach on Shah Porir island, located at the mouth of the Naf River, near the maritime boundary between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Another shows refugees making their way along the shore, gunny sacks under their arms or on their backs, as a cloud of dark smoke rises up behind them.

Siddiqui shot the pictures in September 2017, back when the Myanmar military had set thousands of Rohingya homes ablaze, displacing thousands of Rohingya Muslims — hence the ‘fires’ he spotted on the horizon.

“I had been staking this particular beach for three weeks in order to photograph the arriving refugees.The minute I saw the fires across the river, I knew they (the refugees) would come soon. The boats arrived, and refugees disembarked quickly, unloading their belongings as fast as they could – the whole process lasted just a few minutes because the fishermen/smugglers who brought them there wanted to flee before the border guards arrived”, Danish told a daily.

Siddiqui further added, “I was visiting my parents’ home in New Delhi at the time. I got a visa, and within 24 hours, I was on a flight to Bangladesh”.

Danish, who joined Reuters in 2010 has earlier photographed the destruction in Mosul, and the devastation caused by the earthquake in Nepal in 2015 among others.