Himal Interviews: Rana Ayyub on the dangers of doing journalism in India
b'In May 2018, the United Nation\\u2019s human-rights experts called on the Indian government \\u201cto act urgently to protect journalist Rana Ayyub,\\u201d who had received death threats after a hate campaign was directed against her on social media. An independent journalist, Ayyub has documented alleged crimes committed by public officials, including in her 2016 Gujarat Files, which investigated the complicity of politicians, bureaucrats and police in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the state\\u2019s chief minister. Matters are worse for journalists outside the privileged media circuits of Delhi or Mumbai, especially those who work in the vernacular languages. In September 2017, the Kannada translator of Ayyub\\u2019s book \\u2013 journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh \\u2013 was murdered outside her house in Bengaluru. \\n\\nIn this interview, Ayyub talks to our Founding Editor Kanak Mani Dixit about the traumas of social-media violence, its chilling effect on the free press and how Southasian journalists have seen worse before.'