Forbes Middle East has fired its Asia correspondent, Rachael Chitra, two days after the Oxford University-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published her research paper on hate crimes in India.
The international publication’s decision to terminate its employee is the third such action related to a database of hate crimes in India. In 2017, Hindustan Times took down its hate tracker initiative started two years earlier. It was followed in 2019 by the closing of a hate-crime database run by FactChecker.
“The HR from the Forbes Middle East called the Asian correspondent around 6:30 pm, which is within one hour after serving her the termination order through E-mail, and enquired about her research paper,” a source close to the correspondent told The Cognate, on condition of anonymity.
The source said that a lady from the HR team questioned it’s Asian correspondent about Dr Kafeel Khan, a doctor jailed twice for standing up to the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh. The doctor exposed the 2017 oxygen shortage tragedy at BRD medical college in Gorakhpur of Uttar Pradesh that led to the deaths of more than a hundred children.
“Who’s that doctor and is he a terrorist?”, the source quoted the woman from HR asking her.
Chitra said that her termination was unknown to anybody in her office, and it came all of a sudden in the middle of filing a story. “None of my colleagues knew about my termination, too,” she said.
Chitra created a database of 212 hate crimes in India reported by the English-language media from 2014-to 2020 and wrote the paper “How to cover hate crimes and violence when government sources fail” as part of her fellowship with Reuters from January to July 2021.
In addition to creating a data set, Meera Selva, deputy director of the Institute and director of the fellowship programs, said that Rachel’s research paper tells the reader: “How you create a data set, this is the kind of information you need to gather, this is the kind of information you don’t need to gather. The point of the paper is to look at what isn’t being counted, discuss why it is not being counted, and see what ways it can be counted,” reports Article 14.
I found through my research that the majority of the crimes that happened were against Muslims and Dalits in BJP ruled states.
“Many crimes against these two communities have occurred at a place where they do not have any social support,” Chitra said.
Asked whether it’s pre-planned or co-incidence, Chitra says, in most cases, it’s pre-planned.
And police standing as bystanders, recording and sometimes filing an FIR or Chargesheet against the victims also can be stated as the definition for hate crimes, said Chitra, when asked why there is no legal definition of hate crimes in India.
Chitra said she was irked by the lynching of Junaid Khan on the train by a mob in 2017, and that is why she started collecting a database on hate crimes in India.
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