3 days ago
Jyoti Yadav’s Covid Book Challenges India’s Forced Forgetting
Jyoti Yadav wrote a book about what happened to ordinary people in India during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Many people lost jobs, struggled to travel home, or could not find hospital beds and oxygen.
She says poorer people suffered much more than wealthy people, even though the pandemic affected everyone.
She believes the government’s failures were not properly examined afterward.
Many people tried to forget the painful time instead of demanding answers.
Yadav says journalists must tell detailed stories so these experiences are not erased.
She also describes facing threatening and sexualized abuse online because of her reporting.
Even so, she remains hopeful that careful journalism can make a difference.
Jyoti Yadav’s Faith and Fury documents the suffering and state failures experienced across India’s hinterlands during Covid-19.
Yadav says the pandemic exposed, rather than healed, the divide between India’s working class and upper class.
Her reporting covered migrant journeys, oxygen shortages, crematoria, ASHA workers and rural hospitals during 2020-21.
She argues that social-media trolling, especially sexualized and casteist abuse, led her to self-censor on X but not abandon important journalism.
Yadav says strong ground reporting remains vital but needs financial support, readership and sustained newsroom investment.
- Who
- Journalist Jyoti Yadav, along with migrants, health workers, patients and other people whose experiences she reported.
- What
- Yadav discusses her book Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches from India’s Hinterlands, journalism, pandemic memory and online harassment.
- Where
- Across India, including rural areas and places such as Gurugram, Noida, Rajasthan, Haryana and Bihar.
- When
- The reporting described in the book took place during 2020 and 2021; the book is discussed as a 2026 publication.
- Why
- Yadav says the book was written to document pandemic suffering and alleged state failures before those experiences are forgotten.
Yadav’s Critique
Alternative Explanations
Why pandemic anger faded
Yadav’s Critique
Yadav says the disappearance of public anger may reflect “forced forgetting” shaped by the state and its machinery.
Alternative Explanations
Yadav also says she does not have concrete answers; people may have wanted to leave the tragedy behind, lacked time to reflect, or became accustomed to systemic failures.
Whether Covid united social classes
Yadav’s Critique
Yadav argues that the crisis should have encouraged upper-class Indians to empathize with workers and demand better public services, but the divide instead widened.
Alternative Explanations
The experiences differed sharply by income and access: wealthier people could seek private care, while poorer people relied on government hospitals, faced job losses and endured unsafe journeys home.
The state of journalism
Yadav’s Critique
Yadav argues that detailed, independent and vernacular ground reporting remains capable of producing social, legal and rehabilitative change.
Alternative Explanations
She acknowledges that long-form journalism is economically vulnerable, receives less visibility than podcasts or social-media content, and lacks sufficient grants and institutional support.
Key facts
- Book
- Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches from India’s Hinterlands
- Author
- Jyoti Yadav
- Reporting period
- 2020-2021
- Core subjects
- Migrant hardship, oxygen shortages, hospitals, crematoria, ASHA workers and rural communities
- Class divide
- Yadav says the pandemic failed to create lasting solidarity between India’s working class and upper class.
- Online abuse
- She describes sexualized and casteist trolling linked to her critical political commentary and journalism.
- Next book
- A Westland project about India’s last decade through the lives of eight rural women.
Quotes
Jyoti Yadav
Indian journalist and author of Faith and Fury
“Covid should have brought both classes together. The influential class should have developed a more empathetic view of the working class – their wages, their suffering – and advocated for better policies.”
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“Journalism is not dead; look at the stories being filed by vernacular journalists.”
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Sources
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