By Asma Hafiz, TwoCircles.net
Srinagar: A Kashmiri independent multimedia journalist Ahmer Khan, and his team’s film has been nominated for Emmy. Their film, ‘India Burning’ is part of a documentary series by Vice News which aired on Showtime in the first week of April 2020. It is a collaborative work produced by Ahmer Khan, Jackie Jesko, Siddharth Bokolia, David Talukdar, Zach Caldwell, Sami Ullah and Isobel Yeung.
Ahmer announced on Twitter that his film has earned an Emmy nomination. The Emmy Awards are scheduled to take place on 21 September 2020 though it’s unclear what form the ceremony would take due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“This film is about the rise of Hindu Nationalism in India where 200 million Muslims are branded as infiltrators and the Citizenship Amendment Act protests in Assam which later spread to other parts of India,” says Ahmer Khan.
The documentary series consists of various episodes reporting about war, violence against different ethnicities, protests in the USA, anti-CAA protests in India, pandemic and much more.
Ahmer Khan is the first journalist from Kashmir to have been nominated for an Emmy award.
Talking about his work, Ahmer says, “For this film, we covered two parts, Assam and Delhi. My primary focus was on Assam because I was already there and was covering stories for various publications. This story is a great hit because the quality of filmmaking is very high and we had to take a lot of risks. There are a lot of details in the film which one needs to understand.”
Earlier, a small clip from the film was released on social media. It featured Isobel Yeung interviewing Subramanian Swamy, Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha. His Islamophobic opinions enraged many people who took to social media to express their anger.
“If Muslim population becomes more than 30 per cent, that country is in danger and not all people are equal, Muslims do not fall into the equal category,” Swamy said in the interview.
This is not for the first time that Ahmer Khan has been nominated for an award. In 2019, he was awarded the Agence France-Presse Kate Webb Prize for his reporting on Kashmir lockdown enforced by New Delhi after the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019.
Ahmer was also awarded the prestigious 24th Human Rights Press Awards (2020) in the short video category for his collaborative short film, ‘Defending Kashmir: Anchar’s last stand against India’s control’ which was published by the London based Guardian. .