‘I reported against the local BJP MLA, so the police stripped me down to my underwear’

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Editor's note: Kanishk Tiwari never had much patience for the written word. But show him an image and chances are he won’t forget it. It’s how he got his engineering degree. While his friends spent nights learning by rote, he’d draw up diagrams to remember how machines worked. Images form an impression, he likes to say. Words only fill in the details. Ten years ago, his daughter was born. He stocked up on comics and painting books, and bought her brushes and crayons. As she grew up, they’d sit together every morning while he would go through Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar. Tiwari was a video journalist by then - he worked as a stringer with News Nation since 2018 and also had his own YouTube channel, MPSandeshNews24. But he wanted his daughter to start off with still images. By the time she was seven, she’d get the newspaper from the doorstep unprompted, tracing the political cartoons in her exercise notebook. On 8 April, she picked up the paper and saw her father’s photograph on the front page. There he stood with others, …