The order was unenforceable, and payments were usually never made. Five days after the lockdown was imposed and the exodus had begun, the government asked employers to continue paying wages. In case you have forgotten, here are some things that Dutt reminds us of.įor at least two months, millions of internal migrants (Dutt’s figure is 100 million), among the country’s poorest citizens, remained on the margins of political, public and media attention, as they walked back to their villages. To Hell And Back is an important book an instructive reminder of what happened during those terrible days. Have we forgotten the horrors she reported? Are we, in our usual way, blocking out the bad times, buying the spin and moving on? I have a feeling we are but nobody really knows. It will be remembered, I believe, as the moment when new media set the agenda and mainstream media found that it had no choice but to follow.Īlso read: The Covid pallbearers - How Indians across religion and caste worked to give the dead dignity Her reports had a gritty authenticity and as thousands watched them on their phones and computers, the mainstream media narrative finally changed. She made the mainstream media focus on the human tragedies of Covid and especially on the entirely avoidable tragedy that was the migrants’ exodus caused by a hastily imposed, ill-conceived lockdown. The newspapers had been content to analyse the progress of the pandemic based on data that was available in Delhi and Mumbai. News television had turned the crisis into a cartoonish war, inviting politically aligned guests to shout at each other or, sometimes, inviting well-known Delhi doctors who did not specialise in Covid to tell us what to do and what not to do.īut Dutt’s reporting changed the narrative. In the process, she not only told us the truth about what was going on but also altered forever the balance between the Davids of digital media and the Goliaths of mainstream media. Despite not being backed by a major news organisation, she went out on the road, following the migrants on their way back to their villages and reported on Covid from all over India. But just as I was recalling this conversation, I read To Hell and Back, Barkha Dutt’s book about the pandemic.
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In my experience people tended to have short memories and, in any case, the handling of the pandemic would be spun by a ‘pliant’ mainstream media and by manipulated social media as a triumph for the government.īy 10 March we will know if I was right. I said - perhaps a little cynically - that I wasn’t convinced that this would be the case. How could we expect voters to forget that when they went to the polling booth? His surveys had revealed, he replied, that nearly every family knew someone who had died of Covid – often it was a member of their own family. Did he think the Covid-19 pandemic had dented the Narendra Modi government’s popularity? Sometime during the Delta wave, when we had already lost two members of my wife’s family to Covid, I spoke to a pollster for a column I was writing.