Rana Ayyub


Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist and writer. She is the author of the investigative book .

Background and family

Rana Ayyub was born in Mumbai, India. Her father was a writer with Blitz, a Mumbai-based magazine, and an important member of the progressive writers movement. The city witnessed riots in 1992-93, during which time the family moved to the Muslim-dominant suburb of Deonar, which is where Rana largely grew up. Ayyub is a practising Muslim.

Career

Rana's worked for Tehelka, a Delhi-based investigative and political news magazine. Rana has previously been critical of the BJP in general and Narendra Modi. By her own account, a report done by Rana Ayyub was instrumental in sending Amit Shah, a close associate of Narendra Modi, to jail for several months in 2010.
At Tehelka, Rana worked as an investigative journalist and her big assignment was to carry out the sting operation upon which her book Gujarat Files was based. At the end of the sting operation, the management of Tehelka refused to publish any story written by Rana or based on the data collected by her. Rana continued to work with Tehelka for several months more. In November 2013, her boss Tarun Tejpal, the editor-in-chief and major shareholder of Tehelka, was accused of sexual harassment by one of his journalist subordinates. Rana Ayyub resigned from Tehelka at this point, to protest against the organisation's way of handling the sexual assault charge against its editor-in-chief Tarun Tejpal. She now works independently. In September 2019, Washington Post announced her as its contributing writer to the Global Opinions section.

The Gujarat sting operation

As an investigative journalist working with Tehelka, Rana Ayyub took up a project to conduct a prolonged sting operation aimed at snaring politicians and government officials of Gujarat and get them to reveal any potential cover-ups regarding the Gujarat riots of 2002. Rana Posing as Maithili Tyagi, a filmmaker from the American Film Institute, and set about befriending her intended targets. She spent around ten months in disguise, and got paid a regular monthly salary from Tehelka during this period. However, at the end of the exercise, the management of Tehelka felt that the recordings which she had made over the months did not provide any new or sensational information, that the data gathered by her was of inadequate quality, and that they could not publish any story on the basis of the new data.

The book

In her book Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up, Ayyub documented the verbatim transcripts of recordings, made using a concealed recording device, of many bureaucrats and police officers of Gujarat. The recordings were made in the course of an undercover investigation to reveal the views of bureaucrats and police officers on the post-2002 Gujarat riots and Police encounter killings. Ayyub had been posing as 'Maithili Tyagi', a student of the American Film Institute, having an ideological affinity for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's beliefs, to enable her to make the recordings.

Dispute with ''Tehelka''

and Shoma Chaudhury have disputed Ayyub's claim that her story on fake encounters in Gujarat, which was the result of an eight-month long undercover investigation, was dropped by them. According to Tejpal, Ayyub's story was "incomplete". According to Chaudhury, Ayyub's story "did not meet the necessary editorial standards." Ayyub has responded to Tejpal and Chaudhury's assertions by noting that:

Critical appreciation

has called Ayyub's Gujarat Files "a brave book." Jyoti Malhotra has noted that many journalists have privately applauded Ayyub's courage in authoring Gujarat Files. Priya Ramani has commented: "The abuses from the paid foot soldiers on Twitter bounce off her spiral curls smoothly." Reflecting on the procedure used by Ayyub in composing Gujarat Files, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay has observed: "Going undercover and interviewing many who had been in the thick of gruesome extra-constitutional operations required bravado and this must be appreciated."
Ayyub's investigation of the alleged Gujarat fake encounters has been listed by Outlook magazine as one of the twenty greatest magazine stories of all time across the world.
In the year 2018 Rana Ayyub was rewarded the most Resilient Global journalist at the Peace Palace in Hague. Rana was given the award for demonstrating extraordinary courage and perseverance to bring the news. Each year the honour is awarded to a journalists who, despite threats, abductions and violence continues the journalistic work.

Awards and recognition

  1. In October 2011, Rana Ayyub received the Sanskriti award for excellence in journalism.
  2. The 'Citation of Excellence' was conferred to Rana Ayyub in the 2017 edition of the Global Shining Light Award for her undercover investigation revealing state's top officials’ complicity during the 2002 Gujarat Riots.
  3. Actress Richa Chadda claimed to have been inspired by Rana Ayyub, who is also her friend, in 2016 film Chalk n Duster, where she plays a journalist.
  4. In February 2020, Rana Ayyub awarded with McGill Medal for journalistic courage. She will accept the award at Grady on 22 April. The medal ceremony will take place in the Peyton Anderson Forum at Grady College on Wednesday, 22 April.
  5. She has also been named by Time magazine among ten global journalists who face maximum threats to their lives. She has been profiled by The New Yorker.