Jyoti Yadav Discusses 'Faith and Fury': A Reflection on COVID-19's Impact on Class Divides

New Delhi, India Aug 31, 2026 ALN: A Covid book in 2026? Why now, one might ask, when that catastrophic chapter has been so thoroughly buried, so deliberately archived into a past we’ve collectively agreed not to revisit? But that question answers itself. The forgetting is precisely the point.

When the state collapsed in 2020-21, it abandoned, even actively endangered, the people it claimed to protect – there was no reckoning. No accountability, no honest audit of what elected representatives chose not to do while pyres burned in public parks and oxygen ran out in hospitals.

Jyoti Yadav’s book, Faith and Fury: Covid Dispatches from India’s Hinterlands, refuses that erasure. It is at once journalism and defiance – to remember what was done, what was not done, and who suffered for both. In today’s media landscape, ground reporting has been hollowed out, intimidated, and economically starved. Yet Yadav’s book is also a testament to what journalism can still be when someone travels through a world shut down, to find stories that are preferred to be hidden away.

In a conversation with The Print, Yadav spoke about the making of the book, the crisis of memory surrounding the pandemic years, her experience with social media, and what it means to practice journalism now. Excerpts from the interview:

How did the title come to be?
The title was given by Rama Lakshmi, my features editor at The Print. We were clear from the start: no burning fires on the cover, no Covid or hellish words in the title. Covid could appear in the subtitle, but not the title itself. We also wanted to avoid a harrowing image of crematoriums.

If you read the stories, people were furious, but there was also faith; citizens came forward to help fellow citizens. So we decided to go with Faith and Fury.

For many urban middle-class Indians, Covid has a nostalgic tint – lockdown boredom, isolation, the loss of ordinary pleasures. For much of India, though, as your book shows, it was highways, crematoria, oxygen shortages, ASHA workers, and rural hospitals. How do you see this split in national memory, and is that also part of what shapes our mainstream discourse around Covid?
If the working class protests poor management at a district hospital in Gurugram after someone dies of negligence, the upper class says it is happening elsewhere. We have nothing to do with it, because we do not use district hospitals. The government system is meant for the poor. That is the worldview of a tiny but influential population: healthcare gaps, ASHA workers, and public hospitals are someone else’s problem.

But Covid also neutralised things. Someone living in DLF Camellias in Gurugram could go to Fortis, but even Fortis had no beds. I saw people seeking beds in government hospitals because private ones had locked their doors. All forms of transportation were restricted for everybody.

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. Even a former chief minister was waiting in a queue for hospitalisation. We all deserve better hospitals, better facilities, and an accountable government. But it didn’t happen. Once cases decreased by June or July, the split remained. Migrants most affected in the first wave are poorer than before; in Noida, they are asking for Rs 23 a day and being beaten by the police. The same treatment. The gap is not being bridged. It is widening.

Was there a difference in writing this book compared to writing long-form articles? Was there a challenge, or something new you discovered?
In journalism, you file a story and see it on the website the very next day; that acts as fuel. You get the thrill of being a reporter: people talk about it, there is some impact, and you move to the next story. Writing a book was a very different – boring, dull, and lonely – process. With Covid, every chapter deals with death. Eventually, I decided to put it plainly: death is death. I won’t exaggerate the pain and suffering. Once I stopped struggling to make this a masterpiece and focused on documenting the story, it became easier, because the difficult part – the reporting – was already done.

Reporting was harder than writing. You could have become a statistic yourself. I don’t know how I escaped the virus so many times. There was also exhaustion: two months on the road, one day stretching into the next.

At the heart of this book, and much of your journalism, are stories. We now live in a media climate where journalism is often reduced to facts and neutral descriptions, and narratives, emotions, or any moral clarity is quickly dismissed as bias. What role do stories play for you as a journalist?
Every now and then, someone would crib about how Indian journalism is dead. There is a discomfort among upper-caste and upper-class journalists in India – earlier it was their fold – and I see my entry in that light. There is a study showing that 90% of leadership roles in legacy newsrooms come from one set: same food habits, same world exposure, same convent schools, same universities. They all become journalists, and they have a single lens through which to view India.

If you see a woman working in the fields in rural India, as an outsider, you’ll feel she’s suppressed, that she doesn’t have a voice. But she might own that land, and that work might empower her. I come from the second group. I have an insider’s view.

If you do not have Scheduled Caste, Tribal, Haryanvi, or Rajasthani representation in a newsroom, and someone who grew up in Bombay is writing about Haryana and Rajasthan, then prejudices and stereotypes reflect in the headlines. I’m from Haryana. I’m not going to romanticise my vision, but I’m also not going to report the way my editor thinks I should report on female foeticide. My stories were fresh even for my editors, and they started trusting my lens and my instinct.

In I Am on the Hit List, Rollo Romig writes that when we think of Indian journalism, we think of big newsrooms like The Times of India and Hindustan Times. But the greatest threat to state power often comes from independent journalists, who remain invisible to mainstream conversation.
Journalism is not dead; look at the stories being filed by vernacular journalists. Look at award nominations, and you’ll find 300 good stories. Good journalism is happening. It’s just not going viral on social media. Old-fashioned, long-form text journalism is alive. There is, however, very little being done to sustain it.

When you’re doing ground reportage while the larger narrative is being shaped elsewhere, does that create a sense of pessimism?
I don’t get affected by that noise. The star anchors are all podcasters – driving money, driving impact, getting more visibility. But I’m only a decade into journalism, and I strongly believe that when the noise is over, good journalism will shine.

I have seen this with the Bhanwari Devi story from Rajasthan, over 6,000 words. A digital portal would normally say this was not their story. Yet we went ahead. Features usually draw low readership; they remain at the bottom. But the Bhanwari Devi story stayed at the top of our website for at least two days, and for a year or two after, it kept being shared by people who had never followed The Print or my work. People read it till the last word.

A podcast cannot compete with powerful long-form text that brings real change, whether through litigation or rehabilitation. But for that, we need to be active on social media. In 21st-century India, reporting is not enough; you need readership and influence. Prime-time anchors may have more resources than we do, but we are not helpless.