“Covid was not the great equalizer we made it out to be,” says Barkha Dutt

When Covid first hit India, journalist Barkha Dutt took her car and her gadgets and set out on a 120 day, 30,000 km journey to document the struggles Covid brought on for Indians, be it the exodus of the migrant labourers, or the food being snatched away from the poorest of the poor. She continued this endeavour in the second wave that hit in 2021 as well.

Speaking at an event moderated by filmmaker Mira Nair, Dutt talked about her book “To hell and back: Humans of Covid” wherein she has compiled the stories of all the people she met, giving names and faces to the data figures that have emerged in the last two years.

What Dutt strongly feels is that while people want to forget about Covid, they cannot heal from its trauma, until and unless they remember and acknowledge it. Says Dutt, “Covid was not the great equalizer we made it out to be. Yes, we all struggled, we all lost someone, but we were still the privileged ones.” She adds that there was no one who had to face more severe consequences of the pandemic than women, Dalits, and the poor in India. The journalist says that it was almost as if Covid was a “new caste system”.

Dutt clearly remembers a small child who told her, “Covid means I won’t get food”. A migrant labourer who wondered aloud, “Is it my destiny to walk home like this because I’m poor?”. And a weeping man, with a broken bone, outside a hospital who told her, “I was walking to get ration for my family as it’s the cheapest option. The police beat me up because I was in violation of the lockdown, and left me outside the hospital. But the hospital won’t take me in because it is Covid-only.” Pictures that the journalist can’t get out of her mind no matter how hard she tries.

Dutt recalled the stories of a few people she met. Like Mukesh Mandal, who sold his only asset, which was his phone, bought a table fan and food for his family, and died by suicide the very next day. A year later when Dutt revisited his family, they still had no source of income. Or Jyoti from Darbhanga, Bihar, who had to cycle over 1200 km with her ailing father in the backseat. What shocked the journalist more were the tone-deaf reactions that followed Jyoti’s story. People making her a hero for something that traumatised her for life.

What especially disappointed Dutt was that while the general public was suffering, the TV media took the pandemic as an opportunity to communalise the masses. “The hashtag #CoronaJihad, how people in skull caps became the representative image for Covid numbers, was really shameful,” says she. The only ray of hope for her then were the volunteers who looked past faith and caste, and helped people cremate their loved ones, when the grieving could not do so. It was the volunteers who organised oxygen langars in gurudwaras, and it was people supporting each other, an image that was well-hidden by the mainstream and social media.

There was another thing that gave her hope. Digital storytellers, language press, local reporters and stringers, who stepped out each day to show the reality of how many people died due to the virus, when the government kept on repeating that there was no data. It was people using technology to help out those “orphaned by the Indian state.” It was people like the district collector in Nandurbar, who set up an oxygen plant well before the second wave, and saved countless lives.

What is noteworthy is that the journalist feels that while the government was too present in the first wave, it was too lacking in the second wave, something that led to the innumerable loss of lives.

But as much as Dutt tried to not become the story she was reporting, life had other plans. At the peak of the second wave, the journalist lost her father. Says she, “I ventured more times into ICUs wearing PPE kits, meeting Covid positive people than I can count in the last two years. But the one hospital I desperately wanted to go to, the one person in the ICU I desperately wanted to meet, that couldn’t happen.”

The journalist says that it wasn’t courage that led her to write the book, it was a sense of purpose she felt. Covid had reminded her why she became a journalist in the first place, and it was her responsibility to make the names of those, whose lives were taken away by the virus and poverty, count in history.