Faith and Fury: The India That Hid Behind the Headlines

Some books close a chapter. Jyoti Yadav's does something harder — it insists the chapter never actually closed. Faith and Fury, five years in the making, returns to the people India's pandemic reporting moved on from long ago: the migrant worker still earning ₹500 a day in 2026 that he earned in 2019, the "Bihar cycle girl" who never made it to college despite a Prime Minister's applause, and the Dom community members who cremated the dead around the clock and were handed a folding chair at an Independence Day felicitation as their only reward.

This article is drawn from an in-depth Nous Network conversation with journalist Jyoti Yadav — please go through the full video for more context and detail than a single article can capture.

Speaking to Nous Network about the book, Yadav — who spent years independently following up with the same families, workers, and districts she first reported on during the pandemic's first wave — described a project that began almost by accident, delayed twice by successive waves of the virus itself, and ultimately became something closer to a five-year longitudinal study of what crisis does to people society had already made vulnerable.

What "Faith" and "Fury" Actually Mean

Asked to unpack her title, Yadav pointed first to an image that recurs throughout the book: hundreds of bicycles abandoned at a bus depot near Rampur, discarded by migrants who'd finally caught a ride home — except for those who refused to let go of theirs.

"For the working class, the bicycle is often their only real companion in terms of mobility. There was faith in that bicycle — faith that it would get them home no matter what. But if I zoom out to the larger narrative, it becomes almost paradoxical: I saw a woman in Gopalganj, right on the Bihar-UP border, running a community kitchen for passing migrants — while she herself was dependent on government rations. That's faith in humanity, in the middle of state collapse. What else would you call that?"

The fury, she said, ran through every rung of Indian society except the very top.

"Across both waves, you'll find fury in every class — from the middle class down to the working class. You won't find it in the ruling or elite class. But everywhere else — the oxygen crisis, the workers forced to walk, families given four hours' notice to board a Shramik train and then made to drag their belongings through a twelve-hour journey without water or food, in the middle of a heatwave — that fury was everywhere."

Her publishers, she noted, deliberately kept the word "COVID" out of the title itself, sensing the country's collective fatigue with the subject.

"I kept hearing the same thing everywhere: nobody wants to hear about corona anymore, it's been written to death. So we thought — let's not fight that fatigue. Faith and Fury was simply the most appropriate title for what the book is actually about."

A State That Never Learned to Count

Pressed on whether India's government has taken any real accountability for the migrant exodus half a decade later, Yadav's answer was unambiguous.

"As migrants, they were the worst affected in the first wave — their entire livelihood disrupted, forced into a long journey home — and in the years that followed, that disruption simply continued."

She cited Bablu Paswan, a resident of a remote village on the India-Nepal border in Madhubani district, who paid ₹4,000 for a truck ride home during the first wave, walked the rest of the way overnight, and was quarantined in a government school on arrival.

"His life over the past four years has been marked by continuous disruption. He's poorer now than he was before. The debt from the pandemic years still hasn't been paid off. And when the recent cooking gas price crisis hit, he lost his job again and had to make that same crammed, undignified train journey back home — like people packed in like livestock."

What troubled Yadav most, she said, wasn't just the hardship itself but the state's apparent refusal to even measure it properly.

"I was checking with labour departments in states like UP and Bihar — do you have any internal data on how many migrant workers left after the first wave, or came back? Without a solid, reliable dataset, how are you even framing policy? If a journalist can gather that data from a single panchayat, the state has the machinery and the means to do it at scale. They simply haven't."

Counting the Dead at the Cremation Ground

One of the book's most consequential threads involves Yadav's own reporting from crematoriums — an attempt, initially controversial within her own newsroom, to establish the true scale of India's COVID death toll by counting bodies and funerals directly, after official hospital-based figures failed to account for a specific category of the dead.

"It turned out there were patients who never reached a hospital at all — whose COVID-positive test results only came back after they'd already died. The government's official numbers only reflected people who died from COVID inside hospitals. That gap became glaringly apparent once we started reporting directly from the cremation grounds."

The reporting itself was, by her account, physically and psychologically punishing — compounded by the fact that she had barely any prior experience of crematoriums at all, and was navigating the assignment during a peak heatwave.

"I layered up — an N95 under a surgical mask, sometimes a third layer — because at the time there was a new theory almost daily about how the virus spread, including that it could spread through hair. I sat there, in what was genuinely a very painful scene, asking people whether their loved one's death was actually COVID or not. It didn't feel good. It was a bad experience. But that reporting is exactly where the reasons behind the government's undercounting became apparent."

That reporting from Lucknow, on the undercounting of the dead, became one of the earliest published accounts to put hard, ground-sourced numbers against the government's official figures.

The Guilt of an Empty Seat

Among the book's most emotionally direct passages is a scene Yadav revisited carefully in conversation: driving past long columns of migrants walking toward their villages, with an empty seat in her own vehicle that she and her colleague ultimately chose not to offer to anyone.

"As we drove past these workers — elderly people in their sixties, toddlers two or three years old perched on their fathers' shoulders, women carrying loads — we'd stop, ask them where they'd come from, how long they'd been away, why they were leaving. They'd pause, put down whatever they were carrying, and tell us everything, even though they could have simply chosen not to speak to us at all. But the moment we finished listening and got back into that car, their eyes followed us. That was the guilt — because a journalist's job is to gather information and send it back to Delhi. But as a human being, you're watching a small child in a cloth mask, stripped of his upper clothing by his own parents just to survive the heat, walking on."

She described an agonizing internal debate over who among an entire group of desperate travelers could possibly be offered the one available seat.

"Choosing became extremely difficult — everyone was needy in some way. Someone had a child, someone had a sick elderly parent. We talked about it among ourselves, my driver included. In the end, we decided it wasn't right to make that story about us. But it stayed with all of us — the driver too."

Compounding the dilemma, she noted, was a very real fear at the time that journalists photographed too close to migrants risked being publicly blamed for spreading the virus themselves.

"That trolling risk was always in the back of our minds — that we shouldn't get too physically close to any one migrant, in case someone used a photo to claim we were the ones spreading it. It was a genuine dilemma, constantly running in our heads."

Reporting Alone, as a Woman, on Empty Roads

Yadav was candid about the specific risks she navigated as a solo woman reporter during a period when police presence — usually a baseline safety expectation on remote roads — had been almost entirely redirected toward COVID containment duties.

"In ordinary times, a woman travelling alone after sunset on a deserted road anywhere in India is already a challenge — sexual harassment is always the thing that can escalate. You take extra precautions, share your live location with family. But during COVID, police were deployed guarding hospitals and oxygen plants, not patrolling checkpoints. So it was often just me and my driver, completely alone on those roads."

She described her most frightening encounter while reporting from Araria in Bihar's Seemanchal region, on a story about children orphaned by COVID — a stretch where her vehicle got stuck in mud and she had to continue twelve to sixteen kilometres on a motorbike with a man she had no way of vetting in the moment.

"I was vulnerable, and I knew it. I'd seen every viral video of a woman on a bike with a man on some deserted village road, and what a group of men — young or old — can do in that situation. I just kept praying the whole way, running through worst-case scenarios in my head, because the roads were empty, law enforcement was occupied elsewhere, and you become an easy target in that vacuum."

Reflecting from the distance of several years, she was candid about what she believes newsrooms owed reporters like her at the time.

"With newer digital media houses that don't have institutional legacy infrastructure, female reporters are often sent out entirely alone — no video crew, no local stringer. In hindsight, I think senior editors should have taken far more care around that. But at the time, you're a young reporter who wants to prove to your editors and colleagues in the newsroom that you're capable — despite being a woman, despite the harassment."

Jyoti Kumari: What Happened After the Applause Faded

One of the conversation's most striking threads concerns Yadav's multi-year follow-up with Jyoti Kumari — the teenager who became known nationally as "Bihar's cycle girl" after cycling her injured father over a thousand kilometres to Darbhanga during the first lockdown, drawing praise from figures ranging from Ivanka Trump to Bihar's own chief ministerial hopefuls, and a promise of educational funding.

"Every minister in Bihar wanted to help her. Tejashwi Yadav, Chirag Paswan — they said they'd fund her education. A filmmaker announced he'd make a film about her life. She rightly deserved that attention as an underdog story."

But by the time Yadav caught up with her again in 2024, the picture had changed considerably. Kumari's father had died of a heart attack in 2021 — unrelated to COVID — and while the family had been able to build a modestly better house than their neighbours', the promised educational pathway had simply evaporated.

"When I met her, she told me herself that she wanted to continue her college studies. But by 2024, she wasn't even living in her own home anymore — she was staying with her aunt's extended family. She had never enrolled in college at all. I asked her what her future looked like now, because she'd even received an award from the Prime Minister himself. How does someone slip back into that same invisibility after that much attention? Because she's a migrant's daughter, the future people around her can imagine for her is largely limited to a good marriage."

The promised film, she added, never materialized either, and no minister's fund or scholarship ever actually reached her.

"You look for some solid change in an underdog story like this — some institutional shift, through education or a job, that could carry the next generation forward. That's simply not what happened in Jyoti Kumari's life. She took one step forward, and then the story stopped there. People wanted her to become a successful case study. She didn't get to become one."

Yadav drew the broader, harder implication from Kumari's case herself.

"If someone who received this much national attention, this much recognition, ended up in this situation — one can only imagine the scale of what millions of others, who suffered through COVID with none of that visibility, might be going through right now."

The Community That Cremated the Dead and Was Handed a Chair

Perhaps the most powerful thread in the entire conversation concerns caste — specifically, the near-total erasure of the Dom community, whose traditional, caste-assigned role includes cremating the dead, from India's own pandemic narrative.

"When we talk about frontline workers whose photos come to mind as COVID heroes, it's doctors, bureaucrats, politicians. Who gets written into the story as a hero is also, in some way, linked to your caste and class location. The Dom community barely featured in that narrative at all — even though I went specifically looking to speak with them."

What she found, when she visited cremation grounds like Varanasi's Manikarnika Ghat and sites in Patna, was a workforce operating under conditions she described as almost unimaginable.

"They were working in continuous stretches of up to forty hours — eating, sleeping, and walking among the dead. On top of that was a heatwave, and because wood-based cremations were happening at that scale, the electric cremation machines kept breaking down entirely, since they need cooling time between each use that simply wasn't available."

She documented multiple instances of Dom workers being denied even basic protective equipment, being paid double for rations amid shortages, and in some cases being physically beaten by police enforcing lockdown restrictions while attempting essential travel — despite performing what was unmistakably essential work themselves.

"I remember a young man in Patna who was beaten by police on his way to get food. We ended up dropping him back to his settlement ourselves, since we had a vehicle. That's caste as a factor in our entire national narrative — we simply don't give their work any attention at all."

Perhaps most damning, in her account, was the community's treatment even when official recognition was finally, briefly extended.

"That August 15th, the Doms in Patna were invited and told they'd be honoured for their work during COVID. They went — and came back without any real honour at all. They were just seated on chairs. I keep thinking: if any other caste or class of people had done work of this scale, how much would we, as a society, acknowledge and celebrate it? That's exactly the acknowledgment the Dom community's work never received."

She noted that some of these workers, when asked directly why COVID deaths seemed to have spared their own community disproportionately, offered their own theory.

"They told me: maybe we just have the strongest immunity — this was a disease for the rich, how would it even reach us? That belief came up again and again, alongside a deep hesitancy around the vaccine itself, rooted in a fear that it was some kind of government conspiracy that would leave them too sick to work for weeks."

Faith, Super-Spreaders, and the Politics of What Gets Scrutinized

Asked how she navigated writing about religious gatherings during the pandemic without the material becoming politically weaponized in either direction, Yadav pointed to a consistent pattern of asymmetric scrutiny across faiths.

"The Tablighi Jamaat gathering was covered overwhelmingly, and the scrutiny that should have applied to every large gathering wasn't applied evenly. When I went to Jaunpur and saw how the virus spread there after people returned from religious fairs, or looked at what happened around Haridwar's Kumbh gatherings in Uttarakhand — a lot of people carried the virus home from there too. Religion's role as a super-spreader showed up in multiple places, but administrations generally didn't want to be seen interfering with religion, so they simply stayed away — even in cases where a district collector who did impose a curfew around a specific mela was overruled and told to lift it."

She extended the same scrutiny to weddings and political rallies that continued through the second wave, pointing to one interview with a COVID widow in Patna, Madhu, whose husband died after attending a wedding that had already been postponed once from the first wave.

"She told me plainly: the Bihar government didn't impose its own lockdown until May 4th, and we'd already gone to that wedding on April 28th. If the government itself wasn't enforcing a lockdown, how was an illiterate woman like her supposed to know how seriously to take it? Confusing, contradictory government notifications — one day's guidance directly contradicted the next — created enormous chaos by the time information reached the last person in the chain. Weddings, melas, political rallies, and in UP's case, local body elections — all of these could have been meaningfully intervened on in time, and at least some of the resulting casualties could have been prevented."

On the specific communal framing that circulated around terms like "Corona Jihad," Yadav was careful to distinguish between the online discourse and what she actually encountered reporting on the ground in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

"That language was very prominent on social media and in prime-time debates, and I did see it more aggressively in the areas surrounding Delhi-NCR. But in UP and Bihar specifically, people weren't saying 'Corona Jihad.' They had entirely different theories — in Haryana, where I'm from, people believed it was a Chinese virus that had been deliberately spread. In UP, many initially didn't even accept it was a real virus at all — they thought it was some government scheme to force injections on people. The broader sentiment, in my experience, wasn't one that targeted a specific religion or caste as the source of the spread."

What the Reporting Cost Her

Yadav was unusually candid about the personal toll the assignment took — describing herself, in retrospect, as visibly malnourished in photographs from that period, chronically dehydrated from avoiding bathroom breaks while triple-masked, and, by her own admission, mentally unprepared at the time to process what she was witnessing.

"Looking back at some of my own photos from that time, I was mildly malnourished. I wasn't having proper meals because there was barely any hydration to begin with — you'd drink water in the morning and then avoid removing your masks all day because you were standing in hospitals, worried you'd catch it yourself. I was physically weak, and mentally, there was nothing left in reserve at all."

She contracted what she believes was COVID during the second wave while reporting alone in Lucknow, and described a frightening, days-long struggle simply to get tested and access a working oximeter in the city — ultimately confirming, via a CT scan, that she did not have an active infection.

Asked whether writing the book had helped her process the period, or whether the memories remained with her, she was measured.

"The most difficult part of this book wasn't the writing — it was the reporting itself, because that part was genuinely deadly, and you were simply trying to survive the virus's own reach. Writing wasn't easy either. Some stories, like Kalyani Agrahari's, I still try not to revisit, because I'm a mother myself, and I can relate to her too closely — reading it again would pull me straight back into that period."

Her advice to young journalists heading into similarly harrowing assignments today was direct.

"I would suggest they seek professional help — and once they return from covering a war, a pandemic, a flood, take some real time to decompress. That's how you gain some distance and perspective, and are able to look at the stories again through a different lens. During COVID itself, that distance simply wasn't possible between a reporter and her subjects."

A Warning About the Next Crisis

Asked directly whether India is now better prepared for a comparable public health emergency, Yadav did not hedge.

"There were two kinds of crises in the pandemic — the migrant exodus, and the collapse of healthcare infrastructure. On the first, you only need to look at how migrant workers are again streaming out of hubs like Surat right now, amid the ongoing Middle East tensions — the same police batons, at least trains are running this time, but the same hardship, joblessness, and inflation on return. That alone tells you how prepared we actually are to handle a crisis involving migrant labour."

On healthcare, she pointed to what she called India's tendency toward showcase infrastructure without the staffing to match it.

"There's been a rush to build AIIMS-style medical colleges in every state, the same way there's a rush to bring metro rail to every small city. My book documents a genuinely impressive-looking facility in Madhepura — but how many MBBS doctors, ANMs, GNMs, ward boys, or lab technicians capable of running a ventilator does it actually have? Until those gaps are filled, I don't have the confidence to say we're better prepared than we were during the COVID years — because as things stand, we are, at best, exactly where we were then."

A Message for the Next Generation of Reporters

Closing the conversation, Yadav offered a candid, occasionally uncomfortable reflection on the state of Indian journalism itself — particularly the shrinking space, in her view, for sustained ground reporting on minority rights and communal violence.

"There are so many issues today that mainstream media largely ignores, and they're disappearing even from alternative, non-legacy media spaces too, because reporters simply aren't showing enough interest. Especially when it comes to violence against minorities, I think — with maybe one or two exceptions — there's very little sustained coverage of that at all anymore."

She was careful, however, not to place that responsibility on young reporters themselves.

"I don't want to blame young reporters, because I was one myself. Ground reporting is expensive — you need resources, people willing to travel and do the work, and someone willing to hold their hand and guide them through it. That kind of nurturing is disappearing from newsrooms, and in independent media, the logistical challenges are even steeper — people with minimal resources will naturally ask why they should travel for a story if a single video will do. I think this problem sits far more with editors and the promoters of good journalism, and their willingness to actually take that risk, than with the reporters themselves."

What makes Faith and Fury more than a pandemic retrospective is precisely this refusal to let the story end where the headlines did. A migrant still earning the same wage six years and one currency devaluation later. A national symbol of resilience quietly slipping back into the obscurity she started in. A community that cremated a nation's dead and was handed a folding chair in return. Five years on, Yadav's reporting suggests the pandemic's real aftermath was never the virus curve flattening — it was the slow, near-total disappearance of the people who carried the country through it, from the story of what happened at all.