Jury

Mohammad Ali is an award-winning journalist based in New York and New Delhi who is working on a book on India. His reporting on the rise of Hindu nationalist politics during Mr. Modi’s reign, and Ali's investigations into the involvement of Mr. Modi’s supporters in lynchings of India’s Muslim minority, has received critical acclaim in the Indian and the international media.

The South Asian Journalists Association awarded Ali the Daniel Pearl Award for outstanding reporting on South Asia 2021 for The Rise of a Hindu Vigilante in the Age of WhatsApp and Modi, a year-long investigation into the functioning of Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu vigilante group in India. The WIRED piece is a powerful account of how Mr. Modi’s rise has unleashed an army of violent Hindu extremists on India’s minority communities pushing them to the possibility of second-class citizenship. To report the story, Ali spent months embedded with Hindu extremists.

Ali has emerged as a foremost journalist whose work has illuminated the process behind India’s current transformation into a majoritarian democracy. As a Staff Writer for The Hindu newspaper India’s most prestigious and reputed daily, Ali’s dispatches from the interiors of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous and politically crucial state, documented how the most commonplace and most humane things like eating a meal or falling in love can be politicized and turned into sources of majoritarian rage and violence against minorities. He investigated and exposed the Hindutva propaganda of “love Jihad.”

In his most recent work, Ali reflects on the trauma brought on by his reporting experience—the trauma of being a Muslim journalist in India—in a heartbreaking essay for The Baffler, titled, The Scream: Is this the end for Muslims in India? Ali's piece which initiated a debate on the future of Muslims occasioned several heartfelt responses in the Indian media, including from Mukul Kesavan, one of the country’s best-known journalists, who wrote a column on it, titled Second class bogie: India’s Muslim passengers.

In 2018 Ali was forced to move to the United States after receiving death threats after years of exposing the Hindutva propaganda. His long-form investigations have been published in WIRED, Al Jazeera, The Baffler, and The Hindu, and Ali has been featured on Al Jazeera TV, NewYorker, The Guardian, The Harper’s, Caravan magazine. Ali graduated from Columbia Journalism School, Columbia University in New York.