Barkha Dutt ‘On the road with the pandemic’

Green Templeton was honoured to host Barkha Dutt, one of India’s best-known journalists, winner of over 40 national and international awards, columnist for the Washington Post and Hindustan Times and founder of the digital platform Mojo Story, at the second instalment of the Green Templeton Lectures 2022 on science and the media on Thursday 10 February.

Amy Booth (DPhil Translational Health Sciences, 2021) reports:

‘The poverty will kill us before the virus will’. This stark example of the humanitarian crisis that became obscured by numbers and statistics was one of many harrowing sentiments that Barkha Dutt, leading Indian journalist and visiting fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, shared of her two-year journey reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic in India.

Context

Barkha began her presentation by setting the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in India; how, in the first wave, India experienced one of the most draconian lockdowns with public transport being ceased, non-essential work halting, police being tasked with enforcing the laws and the economic and social challenges that arose from this. As she noted, COVID-19 was supposed to be the ‘great equaliser’, but it actually wrenched open every single inequity and created new ones.

Migration crisis

Through a series of visceral images, Barkha put faces to some of the millions of Indian migrant workers, who, with no source of income and no transport to get home, began the largest mass exodus in India since the partition of the country. She shared images of people, sometimes with no shoes, only a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits, attempting the long trek to their home villages, by day, by night, continuously under threat of police violence. She told stories of starvation, the elderly being left behind, of people taking their lives rather than facing a bleak and uncertain future, with the ever-present sentiment of poverty taking preference over any fear of the virus. As one nine-year old defined the virus: ‘COVID means I go hungry’. It was a humanitarian crisis lost in numbers and hospital statistics with images of this mass migration failing to trigger any political action. With great emotion, Barkha described her feelings of helplessness as a journalist, of her desire to tell a story so powerful that it would change the institution.

COVID crisis

After beginning with the story of a crisis that had been unheard, Barkha then shared the all-too-familiar stories of the virus, accentuated to proportions in India that were unimaginable in many parts of the world. She showed images of people sleeping in hospital corridors, of people who had conditions other than COVID and were unable to access care, of oxygen shortages with people queuing to get a half an hour breath of oxygen before it was the next person’s turn. She shared how, after telling the story of people’s experience with COVID for months, she then ‘became the story’ when her father contracted the virus and tragically passed away from it.

Perhaps some of the most shocking pictures that she showed were those of the masses of bodies lining rivers, or being cremated. She shared how the stigma of COVID meant that people would sneak out at night to bury bodies and that those people whose job it was to wash bodies before burial and cremation were met with ridicule and condemnation. She estimated that the official deaths from COVID were ten times the reported figure, with approximately 5 million people dying of the virus in India alone. She also shared the difficulties in reporting this information, the insults and backlash that she received from people and the government, of being called a ‘vulture’ and accused of selling out her country.

The great un-equaliser

Throughout her presentation, Barkha emphasised the great divide that the pandemic created. COVID reinforced the gap between the rich and the poor, between men and women, between the educated and uneducated. It pushed millions of people into poverty, resulted in mass loss of education, pushed families to send their daughters into early marriage. While most people globally experienced great loneliness and inconvenience from being required to isolate, sanitise and mask, she brought to the fore the additional challenges that the poor faced in isolating when they lived with ten other people in shanties, had no access to clean water and could not afford masks. She shared her own emotional turmoil in reporting these stories, how she discovered a lot about her own elitism and privilege and how all she could do to cope with the mental strain was to get up and continue telling stories of tragedy, hope and heartbreak.

Final thoughts

Barkha Dutt told the stories of people who do not have a voice, people who had been made invisible by their country and by the world. These stories are difficult for us to hear, let alone comprehend, and it becomes all too easy for us listen and feel while they are being told and then to carry on with life as normal. These are stories that we need to hear, as Barkha said, we cannot look away from them. We are humanity and when our brethren are suffering, we need to lend a hand. Once we realise this, accept our privilege and use it for good, maybe then we will all heal together.

Green Templeton Lectures 2022

The final Green Templeton Lecture in this year’s series will be on Thursday 17 February at 17:30, when Sir Charles Godfray, Director of the Oxford Martin School and Professor of Population Biology will discuss What does it mean to be an honest broker?