‘Covid should have brought the working class and upper class together. It did not’: Jyoti Yadav
· Scroll
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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 Scroll, 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...