Unbreakable: The Rana Ayyub Story

Her Past Life Faded Away. Memories of Herself Were Crushed Under the Weight of Daily Danger, Her Life's Mission Distilled to Unearthing the Truth.

By Emily Gambade.

She’s been slut-shamed, a subject of vitriolic hate, threatened with gang-rape, had her face digitally added to a porn video shared on social media, is regularly viciously trolled and abused on Twitter, and has her every move and post scrutinised and attacked to the point that the United Nations stepped in to demand that India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, ensures her safety. Rana Ayyub is a 38-year-old investigative journalist in the real India of today, and she is unbreakable

Rana in South Africa

BEGINS:

May 1, 1984:

The doctor walks towards a worried couple and, without much hesitation, gives them his diagnostic: “Look, she’s not going to survive; why don’t you guys just wait here, it’s going to be a long journey if you go back home by train now.” He is referring to their new born, Rana ( the name means ‘eye-catching’ in Arabic and is a royal name in India, mainly attributed to males ). She barely weighs one kilo and has not much chance of survival; it was more practical they wait at the hospital where the baby would die peacefully than head back home immediately.

But the new born doesn’t die, and after two weeks, the young couple hops on the train and takes Rana back home. The long journey was indeed long; but the doctor was wrong.

It wouldn’t be Rana’s last fight for survival: at age five, she contracted polio and her left hand and right leg stop moving (she would eventually recover). Few years later, the 1992 riots explode in what was then called Bombay, coating the city in madness and fear; to escape abduction and rape, she and her sister were forced to live with a Sikh family, as Hindu girls (Rana is secular Muslim) separated from their family – with no communication – for over a month.

“Since that time, I’ve lived in a great deal of fear. We were often told “the men might abduct you; the men might do something to you” and that stayed with me; it stayed with me to such extent that I always feared men. I went to a girls’ school, a girls’ college and one day, my principal called my mother and told her, “your daughter can’t study because she’s so weak, she’s so scared, she won’t talk to anyone, she’s bright but she’s too shy.”

Mastering her fears and overcoming her shyness, Rana becomes deeply interested in social and political issues. She joins a journalism school and produces her first movie in 2006, focusing on Muslim institutions. ‘Everyone thought we were doing something political, although we were just students from graduate school. They asked: “Who does reporting on terrorism in college?” It was my first project and it opened doors for me.’ She’s soon hired by a television channel where, on her first day, she is told ‘women don’t do political stuff’. ‘They told me, “You can [cover] lifestyle or maybe, if there’s a rape you can also cover it because only women can really talk about rape.” I said that I had a great understanding of political issues, but they just repeated “women cannot do politics” and that was it. ‘In India, male journalists get their information by drinking alcohol with men; you buy them a drink or two and then get the stories. Women can’t do that; you can’t drink, you can’t sit with men while you’re drinking, so you can’t get those stories. But I had this burning desire to do investigations. I wanted to cover big stories that focused on criminal inquiries and on social justice.’

***

August 2018: Rana Ayyub, Indian journalist, writer and the author of the self-published Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up, has come to South Africa to speak at the Daily Maverick 2018 Media Gathering. There, she shared her story with an audience of over 1,000 people; when she finished, the crowd gave her a standing ovation, that felt as a wall of comforting, protective sound around her. She needs it. For years, Rana has been shamed, insulted, alienated – and still is; she hasn’t had a job in over six years, living only off the proceeds of her self-published book; she has feared for her life and lost friends, shot for their beliefs, morals or religion. Her first love, a human rights lawyer, was shot dead; she was only 26.

Life on the frontiers of civil liberties' defense could be brutal in India, Rana's life the best example.

To be sitting in front of her amounts to watching a movie played fast-forward: her words are flooding from her lips, at times hard to catch, flying word clouds exhaled into the ether, her heart-wrenching story reminding us of our own luck and effortless life privilege.

Rana is a paradox: she seems always on the run, yet she is incredibly present, her eyes welded to yours as she recounts her life since she became a journalist. She fills the room, yet her small frame barely fills the chair. Her inconceivable courage is countered by moments of obvious fragility, popping strenuously like the stream of pills she has to take to fight anxiety. The toll her fight to have her story heard took on her health was massive.

Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up, is a record of Rana’s eight months-long sting operation during which she uncovered the involvement of high-powered politicians, including now India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, officials, bureaucrats and police officers in the 2002 Gujarat riots that lead to the death of 1,044 people (790 were Muslim and 254 Hindu).

“Muslims make up about 14 percent of a population of 1.2 billion people,” says Rana, “there’s a constant desire to throw them out, so these riots keep on happening.” Although the nation is founded on a secular constitution, it remains highly polarised and religious riots often loom over India’s political life.

Rana on Being Muslim

Rana went undercover in 2010, while she was working for the investigative magazine Tehelka; for the sting operation, she changed her identity, became a young American woman of Hindu descent named Maithili Tyagi.

“A friend of mine was studying in Los Angeles, at the Film Institute. I based my new identity on her. I learned how to do the American accent on the internet and from a teacher I hired; the name Maithili comes from a Hindu goddess. I thought that with such name, people would think I was coming from a very religious Hindu family. I asked my mum to call me Maithili; I had to train a lot not to respond when people called me Rana, not to turn around or rise my eyes. I straightened my hair completely and started wearing ash green lenses and this big bandana around me.”

After some weeks of preparation, her body covered with cameras and recording devices, she left her family and her identity behind and started mingling with Gujarati socialites. It took her a few months to get to the top, first meeting with different cops, then members of the anti-terror squad, then graduating to ministers. ‘I had all these devices on me and it would get so hot at times. They were hidden in my watch, on the buttons of my robe, in the tunic’s pleats. I had to remember which device was on and which one wasn’t and make sure to switch [from one to another] when the

“I had all these devices on me and it would get so hot at times. It was hidden in my watch, on the buttons of my robe, in the tunic’s pleats; I had to remember which device was on and which one wasn’t and make sure to switch [from one to another] when the battery ran flat; so, besides asking questions and trying to get to the truth, I had to keep a tab on each [device] and which machine should I operate now,” she recalls, her hands quickly mimicking months of silent gestures.

Getting closer and closer to high officials, she managed to talk to an anti-terrorist squad chief who had grown fond of her:

“I kept playing the cool Hindu girl from LA. I started to smoke although I don’t even smoke and he opened up to me; he started telling me about a 19-year old Muslim girl who died during the riots. It had been a big story because the girl was supposed to be a terrorist but turned out to be just a regular college student. It was again Modi’s [and other officials’] way to make people fear Muslims, to make them believe that Muslims were a threat [to society]. So, we’re talking about this girl and he said ‘I was told to shoot her. She was in the farm house for three days and I killed her.’ At that moment, I was sure I had a story. I provoked him, I said, ‘I’m glad you killed her because these Muslims need to be taught a lesson.’ I asked him what did he do with her and he said, ‘oh, we kept her in the farm house and then one man raped her to teach her a lesson.’ Every gory detail was captured on camera.

“He was told to shoot her by higher officials.”

As she gathered more and more testimonies, Rana also grew more tense; she would go back every evening to a bungalow close to the highway a friend had arranged for her to save the day’s recordings and the information she’d heard; she’d work until the crack of dawn, with a dog and a cobra for only companions (the dog would bark at the cobra preventing it from getting too close). She was already feeling the effects of months of being undercover, stress, anxiety, an unbearable sense of solitude slowly holding its grip on her; she fought insomnia, panic attacks, paranoia.

“My only entertainment at the time was shouting at a dog and a snake; I started sleeping at six in the morning because at night, I worried somebody would enter the bungalow, that someone was going to kill me, or was going to take my footage away. I only realized months later that for that entire eight months I did not get my periods. Later, my psychiatrist said that we often internalize our fears; but it does affect you.”

Every day, she ran the risk of being discovered; sometimes because the cameras would burn her skin when they ran for too long, forcing her to lift her clothes slightly to get some air; other times because there were metal detectors on her way to meeting a minister. Her past life faded away, memories of herself were crushed under the weight of daily danger, her life's mission reduced to unearthing the truth.

Rana finally met Modi; his first words, believing she was coming from LA, were to say how much he loved Americans, pointing at a book on Barack Obama and adding, ‘I want to be like him some day.’ Her cameras were rolling. She knew that given the opportunity to stay longer with him, she would be able to gather more evidence. But her editor back at Tehelka told her it was enough; he asked her to come back; he was worried she would get caught, worried about the scope of the story and the consequences it may have.

***

In March 2011, eight months after taking the identity of Maithili Tyagi, Rana was back in New Delhi. She had collected enough evidence, both from her personal notes and her recordings, to bring top ministers, and possibly Narendra Modi, down. Or so she thought. ‘I came back and I was like, this investigation will be in Time magazine! It’ll be everywhere! My editor said, “This is going to shake the world. You’ve got the most damning indictment of the most powerful politicians in the world.” I was so excited.’ But weeks passed with no sign of Rana’s story being published. When the young journalist enquired, her editor ignored her request and seemed to downplay the urgency, letting more time go by. Eventually, Rana was told her story had some ‘holes’, that it wasn’t enough, that everything wasn’t coming together.

“I asked them to let me know what was missing, that I would go back undercover but they wouldn’t let me go. They wouldn’t give me more details, they were just not keen on publishing the story anymore. [My editor] told me, ‘come on Rana, it’s just one investigation...’ I couldn’t believe it; I told them ‘it’s not just one investigation; I put my life in danger, I spent eight months of my life in there, I had a nervous breakdown, I went through hell.’” 

Rana could feel things had shifted; she tells me she was sure the media company had struck some deal, adding that “they were suddenly making a lot of money, I just couldn’t place my finger on who they had struck a deal with. Or they were under pressure because Modi was set to become the country’s Prime Minister. They had cold feet. They asked me to hand over the footage and let it go. I copied everything, keeping the original footage safe with me. It was instinctive. It was like something wrong was going to happen. And that’s when I started to [look for] another publisher but everyone was afraid. Everyone. Each [publisher] I met with saw the footage and said ‘shit, this is big!’ And every single one of them refused to publish it.”

As Rana realised how Modi’s control had permeated India’s social and political life and was stifling freedom of the press, the anxiety attacks grew. By the end of 2015, to fight increasing panic attacks and anxiety, she was taking nine pills in the evening and six in the morning. She was on her own, distressed by the general lack of empathy – especially from her peers – and support. In March 2016, using the money her mother had saved for her wedding, Rana self-published her story in a book that ended up selling more than 350,000 copies and was translated in over 15 languages. At the launch – Rana tells me every journalist and publisher attended, even the ones who closed her doors on her – she received applause for her bravado. Yet, the next morning not one of the journalists present at the launch, reported on the book in their publications. It was an omerta, Rana finally understood.

***

These days, Rana Ayyub is both the hunter and the hunted. She runs through India and abroad to share the findings of her eight-month sting operation, shattering the idea that there is not enough evidence to charge Prime Minister Modi and other officials in connection with the 2002 Gujarat riots. Interspersed with the verbal assaults are also powerful messages from strangers thanking her for her work, telling her they are praying for her; somebody also sent her a rosary from church and on Eid, one Hindu family sent her a bouquet of flowers with a note that read, “you are our daughter”.

Her mother still hopes for her daughter to get married one day, but Rana says she is taking it as it comes; she doesn’t think it’ll ever be possible for her to get married “because India is a very chauvinistic and patriarchal society. You won’t bring a girl home that is taking on the government. Taking a girl like that home would be too much trouble.”

She has been offered international fellowships to live abroad but is determined not to leave her country. This is where she feels her place is, trying to fight for a better India, to fight for a freer press.

To those who call her brave, she has one answer, her eyes firmly engraved in yours:

“You praise me like I am your hero. But what are you doing? Where is your sense of protest? We all have a role to play. I say, listen to your consciousness. Do something.” 

The Flora Lewis Award, the first for an Indian

(This piece first appeared in Marie Claire, South Africa)