Journalist Akanksha Kumar has been awarded the Prem Bhatia Award for Excellence in Political Journalism 2026 by the Editors Guild of India, for five reports published by Newslaundry in 2025.

The ceremony was held at the India International Centre in Delhi on Tuesday. The award ceremony featured a memorial lecture by senior advocate and Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal, who spoke on the topic: “The two strongest pillars of democracy are the press and the judiciary. Both have failed us. Why?”

All these reports required months of following up on cases that no one else was tracking, and travelling to districts that rarely make the national news. There was no guarantee at the outset that any of them would come to anything. That is the part of journalism that advertising doesn’t fund and that access-driven newsrooms cannot afford. The space for it is shrinking, visibly and quickly. It exists at Newslaundry because subscribers pay for it. 

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The five reports that have been awarded span three states. They cover different themes: extrajudicial killing by the police and the impunity that follows it; the stretching of anti-terror law to turn a communal riot into a foreign conspiracy; the slow legislative squeeze on religious minorities, and the media ecosystem that softens the ground for it; and the licence enjoyed by Hindutva mobs on the street, in full view of a police station. 

A mother against the Uttar Pradesh police

This report, published in June 2025, was headlined “In Prayagraj, a mother’s battle against UP cops for man’s death after ‘staged encounter’.”

Vijay Soni’s death was one of thousands. Between March 2017 and September 2024, the Uttar Pradesh police conducted 12,964 gunbattles — nearly five a day. Anju Devi, Soni’s mother, petitioned a court, which ordered an FIR against 12 policemen. The FIR was never lodged. Ten days later, the police secured a stay from the Allahabad High Court.

The report reconstructed the chain of events from police records and legal documents, and set out precisely where the police theory falls apart.

Cut, copy, charge

The report, headlined “Cut, copy, charge: Inside Haryana police’s flawed case on Nuh violence” was published in April 2025. 

On January 15, 2024, three Haryana police personnel gave statements about the communal clashes in Nuh six months earlier, in which two home guards were killed. The violence in question had been framed as retaliation for the deaths of Nasir Hussain and Junaid Khan, who were allegedly murdered by cow vigilantes in February 2023. 

The statements were identical – word for word. That detail opened up a larger examination of the tactics used to justify arrests under the UAPA, and to sustain the claim of a foreign conspiracy behind the July 2023 violence.

How Rajasthan’s anti-conversion law was built

The two-part series was published in November 2025. At the time of publication, Rajasthan was the ninth BJP-governed state with its own anti-conversion law. Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh were considering similar legislation, even as the Supreme Court heard pleas challenging the constitutional validity of such laws. In Karnataka, the Congress had promised to repeal the law after coming to power in 2023, and had done little about it since.

In the first part, headlined “In Rajasthan’s anti-conversion campaign: Third-party complaints, police ‘bias’, Hindutva link”, Newslaundry tracked seven cases of alleged religious conversion.

They were filed between February 2024 and July 2025 across Bharatpur, Dausa, Jhunjhunu, Jaipur and Banswara, and in Pilani tehsil. It showed that a pattern emerged well before the state government moved its anti-conversion law: complaints filed by third parties with no connection to the families involved, police who acted on them, and attacks on Christians praying in their own homes.

The second part, headlined “How YouTubers and media outlets drive Rajasthan's anti-conversion hysteria”, turned to the amplifiers. YouTubers and media outlets carried allegations from the VHP, Bajrang Dal, RSS and BJP leaders and converted them into settled fact – no trial, often not even a chargesheet.

A birthday party in UP’s Bareilly

This report was published in December 2025. It was headlined “‘Should I kill myself?’: How a woman’s birthday party became a free pass for a Hindutva mob”.

Shivangi had two months left of her nursing course at the Keshlata Institute of Nursing. She wanted to end the year celebrating her 22nd birthday with her batchmates. A Bajrang Dal worker arrived at the cafe, and her Muslim classmates were accused of “love jihad”. She filed a complaint. No FIR was registered. Instead, her classmates and the cafe owner were booked for unlawful assembly.

The Prem Bhatia Journalism Awards and Lecture were instituted in 1995 by the Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust, in memory of the veteran editor of the Tribune. In 2024, the trust handed its corpus to the Editors Guild of India.

Editor’s note: Akanksha Kumar was an independent journalist when she wrote these reports for Newslaundry. She is currently with The Wire.