KARACHI: A Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist from Indian-occupied Kashmir, Sana Irshad Mattoo, was barred by immigration officials at the New Delhi airport from travelling to France on Saturday “without any reasons”, The Indian Express reported.

In a tweet, the 28-year-old journalist said she was scheduled to travel from New Delhi to Paris for a book launch and photography exhibition as one of 10 award winners of the Serendipity Arles Grant 2020 but was stopped at the airport’s immigration desk despite procuring a French visa.

“I was not given any reason but told I would not be able to travel internationally,” she tweeted, according to a Dawn.com report.

“This is insane, there is nothing against me. One of the officials told me I should check the reason from [Indian-held] Kashmir from where directions had come. I don’t understand why I was stopped,” Al Jazeera quoted her as saying. She told the outlet that she was “disheartened” by the move since she was looking forward to the opportunity for a long time.

The grant offers support of 1.2 million Indian rupees to lens-based practitioners from the South Asian region and is open to practitioners who are residents of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Ms Mattoo, a resident of Srinagar, works as a photojournalist for the international wire agency Reuters. She won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in feature photography along with three others for their coverage of Covid-19’s second wave in India.

The move against Ms Mattoo comes in the wake of recent clampdowns on Indian journalists who have been critics of the Narendra Modi-led government.

In January, Indian authorities arrested Sajad Gul, an independent journalist and media student in Indian-occupied Kashmir, which was followed by the arrest of the editor of The Kashmir Walla news portal, Fahad Shah, in February.

Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2022