The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday provisionally attached Rs 1.77 crore belonging to journalist Rana Ayyub in connection with a case of money laundering.
The ED case is based on an FIR registered by UP police last year, where it was alleged that Ayyub collected a huge amount of funds through online crowd funding platform Ketto in the name of relief work but allegedly diverted the funds.
Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist and author of the controversial book “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up.” She was previously an editor with Tehelka, an investigative magazine in India. She has reported on religious violence, extrajudicial killings by the state and insurgency. However, she is now on news for the financial transactions she made in the name of charity.
Let’s look at her life:
Rana Ayyub was born on May 1, 1984, in Mumbai, India as the daughter of Mohammad Ayyub Waqif who was a writer with Blitz, a Mumbai-based magazine, and an important member of the progressive writer’s movement.
But her mother’s name is still not known to us. Likewise, the city witnessed riots in the year 1992 to 93, during which time her family moved to the Muslim-dominant suburb of Deonar, which is where Rana largely grew up. probably this played a major role in her character building that often is considered anti-national.
She did her schooling in Srinagar and went on to attend Jamia Millia Islamia University which once again defines what is now. She post graduated in Social Communications and Media from the university.
Rana Ayyub worked for “Tehelka” which is a Delhi-based investigative and political news magazine. She also had previously been critical of the BJP in general as well as Narendra Modi. She was able to work as an investigative journalist and her big assignment was to carry out the sting operation upon which her book Gujarat Files was based. End of the sting operation, the management of Tehelka refused to publish any story written by Ayyub or based on the data collected by her. However, she even did continue to work with Tehelka for several months more.
Rana Ayyub now works independently. But, Washington Post hired her as its contributing writer to the Global Opinions section in September 2019. Then, in October 2020, HarperCollins India published an open letter written by Ayyub, to protest the controversial appointment of Actor Gajendra Chauhan as the Chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII).
When she took up a project to conduct a prolonged sting operation aimed at snaring politicians and government officials of Gujarat as an investigative journalist working along with Tehelka. She then went on to spend around ten months in disguise to befriend her intended targets. She even was able to get paid a regular monthly salary from Tehelka during this period. However, the information she collected was not much of help.
She published a book “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up”. She documented the verbatim transcripts of recordings, made using a concealed recording device, of many bureaucrats and police officers of Gujarat during writing the book. During this time, she also had a dispute with “Tehelka”. Likewise, her book was praised by many people and big personalities as well. And, in the year 2018, she was able to receive the “most Resilient Global journalist” by Dutch non-profit Free Press Unlimited for resisting attempts to stifle her work.
In the Haren Pandya murder case, the Supreme Court of India dismissed Rana Ayyub’s book, stating that “it is based upon surmises, conjectures, and suppositions and has no evidentiary value.” Ayyub termed the court’s comments “puzzling”, stating that the CBI had used her work as evidence in other related cases, and noting that no officer or bureaucrat had denied her claims or taken her to court.
In another incident, Rana Ayyub wrote an opinion piece on NDTV that Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan played three Muslim characters in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, Dear Zindagi, and Raees to give a message, which was a rebellion. Shah Rukh Khan wrote another opinion piece on Indian Express, referring to the opinion piece by Rana Ayyub, that he did not know the name of the character he played in Karan Johar’s film and he had no intention of making any statement by playing Muslim characters.
The entire life of Ranna Ayyub is still a mystery for many people, including the very name of her mother. However, the recent allegations have made people know more about this controversial journalist.
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