Ismat Ara

Ismat Ara is an award-winning journalist with bylines in Times of India, TIME, BBC, Wire, The Quint, Al Jazeera, The Hindu, HuffPost and Frontline. A recipient of the UN Laadli Media Award, her reporting has been raised in the Indian Parliament, has made it to courts and led to tangible real-world impact. She has spent time going where the story insists on being told, reporting from the ground on some of modern India’s most consequential moments in the past decade—including the anti-CAA protests, the Delhi riots, COVID-19, the farmers’ movement and the Hathras gangrape. Her work has documented violence, environmental collapse, elections, drought-struck villages, custody deaths, honour killings, sinking hill towns and laws designed to redraw the boundaries of belonging—always from the only angle that holds: the human one. Love Under a Saffron Sky is her first book, emerging from years of fieldwork into one of the most volatile narratives in contemporary India.