By Amitabh Ranjan
By the time the nation thought the March 24, 2016, decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes was and would remain the ne plus ultra of the Modi government’s administration, it learnt the hard way that it was not so.
Just two months after the WHO declared Covid-19 as a public health emergency of global concern on January 30, 2020, the Union government announced a nationwide lockdown for 21 days, starting the intervening night of March 24-25.
In cities across India, millions who worked every day to put food on their families’ plates were suddenly out of work. While Covid was still a lurking fear, hunger and starvation stared them in the face. The cities they helped build, keep clean, and run through sundry businesses suddenly disowned them. With no assurance from the government to sustain them through the lockdown, an exodus of humongous proportion, migration back home, started —on foot, cramped in buses, hanging on to trucks, packed like sardines in a handful of trains, or whatever means that came their way.
Ground Zero
Jyoti Yadav, a young journalist, decided to hit the road to chronicle the travails of these nowhere people, travelling to the vast hinterland of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar—the states contributing to the bulk of migrant population—during the two waves of the pandemic that saw the health infrastructure across cities and villages succumb before the task they had never prepared for. Wrapped between the covers of her maiden book, Faith and Fury, are stories of various hues from her reportage. They are about human miseries and sheer grit; of bureaucratic callousness and compassion; and of desperation and survival instincts from across the vast swathes of the two states that she saw, felt, and reported.
Five years after the virus rampaged through the world, taking a toll of unimaginable proportions across geographies, thousands of people are still nursing the scars left by the loss of lives and livelihoods, and psychological trauma. The man on the street and the powers that be need to revisit those moments to learn and introspect. Not doing so would be fraught with administrative susceptibilities as this book brings to the fore, chronicling the two waves of the virus that was nothing less than a mayhem.
Jyoti’s stories are as they were at ground zero. They have been written on the highways, in hospitals, at burning ghats and crematoria, in remotest of villages, small towns and the states’ capitals, on railway platforms, in empty guest houses and hotels. Wrapped within the covers of her book are, among many others, the story of the death of a young primary school teacher who was forced to report for duty during the UP panchayat elections despite being in an advanced stage of pregnancy; about a son who saw his father die because an oxygen cylinder could not be arranged; about another young man whose father was declared dead but was found alive when the son went to claim the body; about Dr Bilal who could not hold back his tears while talking to the author because he felt helpless seeing the devastation; about a Dom who would cremate and perform last rites of as many as 35 bodies in a day without having the time to eat; and about nurses who worked eight-hour shifts in a premier government hospital with washrooms so dirty they could not use and waited till it grew dark so that they could relieve themselves by the roadside.
Six months on the road in the remotest parts of the country is no mean story in itself. Hardly any place to stay for the night, few options to get your food, a lurking danger of getting infected by the virus on the prowl, making one’s way through strict vigil around hospitals and government offices, the prospects of getting harmed on a deserted road, or being at the receiving end of slur and sneers— often the author herself becomes the subject of her dispatches. But the circumstances only serve as a side bar to show what serious reporting entails. To borrow from Jyoti herself verbatim, as she mentions in her beautifully written ‘Acknowledgements’, the book is a product of an unspoken social contract between a journalist and the public…of a connection that allows journalists to step into people’s lives and witness events that may be very personal to them, even death.
A book of this calibre deserved a little bit more editing rigour from the publishers. There are a few slipups of language and fact-check that could have been avoided. But these do not dent in anyway the intrinsic merit of this painstakingly written account from the grassroots, and from the heart. This is the gold standard of long-form narrative journalism. Wannabe journalists would do well to pick up this book and go through it diligently, for no textbook or classroom teaching will replace what the author teaches in black and white here.
The writer is a former journalist who teaches at Patna Women’s College
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.
Faith and Fury: COVID Dispatches from India’s Hinterland
Jyoti Yadav
Westland
Pp 294, Rs 599