Barkha Dutt: "Let people criticise my work, I am open to genuine criticism"

So we drove and came back, we went to Jaipur, for example, and to Indore. We would not stay anywhere overnight. Then when we saw the exodus of workers, men, women and children, I realized that approach would not work if we wanted to tell the story; one would have to take the chance and report from the ground. We did not know how far we could get. Border crossings were a problem – we had to plead with police constables, sometimes we would have to call the district magistrate to let us through. That is how it happened a lot of the time.

Now, social media is often known as a toxic place, but sometimes over Twitter, someone would say, I have a place where you can stay, or point us to friends of friends, and wherever we went, strangers offered us food. When we reached Mumbai, I realised we could keep going. We could take halts in cities. Remember, we had to undertake this road journey because public transport was closed.

You mention in your book that before 2020, you would have thought of a health crisis as a soft story instead of “calamity and chaos and riots and revolts to chasing politicians on prime time”. What was it about the pandemic that made you devote two years of your life to covering it?

It was my rediscovery of myself as a journalist. The old version of Barkha had got lost and got comfortable in studio life. I was not reporting enough or covering issues that matter to people. I was a political journalist, a war reporter, these were not really issues that mattered to people.

So for instance, in the book I write how I went to this village where very poor people have to purchase water, and the free water they get is chemically contaminated because of the factories surrounding them. There was an emphasis on hand-washing everywhere, but these people were developing skin diseases because of the contaminated water. And this village is an hour away from the capital. I knew nothing of this, because I had never done stories on inequality. There was a hierarchy of news in the newsroom. But as it turned out, the pandemic was the hardest story I’ve covered.

Covering the pandemic meant not health reporting alone, but also civic and disaster reporting, and most importantly, humanitarian storytelling. Was that why this was your toughest assignment?

It was tough for many reasons. The story on the surface was medicine and science, but the story at the heart was about people. Also, there were the invisible dangers of reporting the story. I can take a risk for myself, but I was responsible for others, as a media entrepreneur and editor.

In the first wave, we didn’t know how Covid spread, we thought it spread from contact with contaminated surfaces, so we wore no masks but had only gloves. And a story like this requires sources I didn’t have because I hadn’t covered this issue. I didn’t know many things like how the distribution of oxygen works practically on the ground. I didn’t know how the system worked in practice, where hospitals had to keep some beds available only for poor people. I didn’t know why I felt so bad after wearing PPE, until I spoke to medical professionals. And you want to be compassionate, sensitive, not invasive, not intrusive, but capturing and chronicling what is happening. No one is pretending to be perfect, you do the best you can.

Would you say reporting from the pandemic took a mental and emotional toll on you? What happened, and did you take help?

I haven’t sought help other than a small and close circle of friends. It helped that I have had a lot of exposure to violence and conflict as a journalist, but not on this scale.

There was guilt being in a car while so many were walking (back to their villages mainly in the first lockdown), and going back to the car while they kept walking. One way to reconcile was to tell a powerful story so hopefully conditions would improve for them.

Guilt came when my father died (of Covid). The ambulance was really not an ambulance, it was an ordinary car with an oxygen cylinder. There was a struggle to find a bed. There was a lot of guilt about what I should have done when he was still alive.

After all this, I have become emotionally brittle and my sleep is damaged. I have considered taking help but haven’t done it yet.

What I found in common during my reportage was, everybody wanted their story, or the story of somebody they loved, to be told. So I have named people in the book. No one is nameless or faceless, they are fleshed out human beings with people in their lives. It isn’t a book on policy or science but a story of India and its people, about how Covid showed the already existing inequalities in society.

Your book has forthright language, such as, “At a time when the Indian state should have shown its most benign, generous face, it ended up being intimidatory and draconian”. Would you please elaborate a bit on how this has been brought out in the book?

You’re speaking of the paradox of the state that is overpresent and underpresent, right? When I say ‘state’, I’m talking about institutions of the state, not a particular political party. During the early exodus, on the eleventh day when I went to the (state) border, not an official or policeman was trying to stop them from crowding. It’s a multilayered reality: the policeman was a frontline worker, suffering, exposed to Covid, but was weaponised against people because they were violating curfew.

And why were they violating curfew, to go home to be with their loved ones. They were hungry, too. I heard it a lot: “Poverty will kill us before the virus does". Another thing I heard was, “If we have to die, we will die in the company of our loved ones". Sometimes you needed the state’s compassion; and sometimes you needed the state to step back and authority was being imposed. Every country made mistakes in the first wave. Mistakes were inevitable, but one has to step back and see them. We have to keep learning and so it’s important to talk about mistakes.

In the second wave, when I was taking my dad to hospital, this happened to me: our ambulance was stopped at a checkpoint.

In the book, you have stepped back and made space for citizens' rage, suffering and sorrow to emerge on the page. You must have absorbed a lot of that. Did you manage to avert ‘compassion burnout’, and how?

I had prior experience with conflict, death and loss, so I am a little better trained. Experience matters. But it is complicated – you must be empathetic and sensitive, but also efficient, and you cannot collapse. So how to remain empathetic? I keep empathy open, but occupy my mind with logistics – in Kargil, it was how to send tapes back? We would talk to aircraft pilots who were taking dead bodies away, and send tapes with them. Nowadays, we have dongles to send footage back.

During these reporting trips, too, I displaced my anxieties with logistical dimensions of journalism which take 50 percent of your energy, more than the actual reporting – how to get food, how to get the footage out, how to talk to your editor in a no-network zone. There was news that workers had been run over by a train and died on the railway track. I visited their village in Madhya Pradesh. We would drive around for hours to find a mobile tower so we could send footage to the editor. I remember once going under the tower and weeping. I didn’t know why I was weeping. It was my 100th day of coverage. Your depression gets displaced through logistics. While writing the book, I often cried and called my editor to say I couldn’t do it.

This is a sad but hopeful book. It’s also about volunteers, strangers who came to cremate babies from families they didn’t know, people who crossed differences of class, religion and identity to help each other. Five more rotis were made in each home to give to migrant workers. I had gone out with three kurtas; people did my laundry. When my car broke down, they offered their vehicles. People helped each other with beds and oxygen. This is also a book about our essential spirit and hope.

Journalist Barkha Dutt, and the cover of her book 'To Hell and Back: Humans of COVID'. (Image of Dutt by Ramesh Lalwani via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

More than perhaps any other individual journalist in the pandemic, you visited villages. Is it that we city-dwellers still don't have a clear picture of how villages were affected by the pandemic?

Even the villagers don’t have a clear sense of how they were affected. In the second wave, a lot of villages began seeing a sudden spike in deaths, and the symptoms were Covid symptoms. Some people got tested, and it was Covid, some did not get tested. That is one problem – if you died without testing, you were not counted. There was invisibilization of Covid in villages. Bodies were abandoned on riverbanks or there were mass cremations. This was because either there was no money for cremations or because of social stigma, because there was no clear idea what was happening, or social ostracisation. What happened in rural India will never be fully known, but you can know the pattern.

You came to Mumbai first. What was it about our cities’ health infrastructure in general that struck you?

A class divide – you saw poor people outside public hospitals. Also people with TB and cancer who had nowhere to go. Some hospitals became Covid-only hospitals, which in hindsight was a mistake.

And people were selling what little they had, a mobile phone, a bit of land, to be treated in a private hospital. I saw the tragedy of hospitals, where oxygen supply was interrupted, so poor people had sold everything they had to get their loved ones treated here, and the oxygen supply ran short, and those deaths were not acknowledged.

It was compounded injustice. What was unusual here was people helping each other out with oxygen supply – and gurudwaras running oxygen langars.

You have critiqued the current administration for poor decisions during the pandemic. Are you bracing for a backlash?

But I often offend political parties who are critical of the BJP. In my recent election coverage, I was trolled by non-BJP parties. I am attacked by all parties. Fake news about my reporting about Kashmiri Pandits has been weaponised. The past few days, I have been getting violent threats. But I am open to criticism. BJP, non-BJP doesn’t concern me, I am not focusing my energy on politics, my focus is on people. Their focus should be on my work.

Speaking of backlash, some even said during your coverage of the pandemic that Barkha Dutt doesn’t just cover the story, she also makes herself its protagonist. Not to imply that you owe anyone any answers, but would you care to respond?

It’s a question that I am responding to with the caveat that, as you said, I don’t need to explain again and again. My approach has been to make direct communication with readers and audiences. The logistics are a part of the story.

Technology has impacted news coverage. You can create a live streaming studio in a remote part of the country, by a river bank, from the front seat of a car, from a moving car. Logistics is as much a part of the report. Sharing this with the audience is intrinsic to how I communicate. I have been personal as a journalist, and I intend to be who I am. Let people criticise my work, I am open to genuine criticism.

How did the book project with Juggernaut go through?

The book was conceived about the migrant exodus in the first wave. I said, Chiki (Chiki Sarkar), even if no one reads it, I have to write it. We didn’t know a second wave was coming. And so the book changed.