Teesta Setalvad

Teesta Setalvad (born 9 February 1962) is an Indian civil rights activist and journalist.

Born in 1962 into a Gujarati family, Setalvad is the daughter of Atul Setalvad, a Mumbai-based lawyer, and his wife Sita Setalvad.

Her paternal grandfather was M. C. Setalvad, India's first Attorney General.

Setalvad married Javed Anand, a journalist turned minority rights activist.

They have two children, a daughter and a son.

She subsequently went to college, studied law for two years, dropped out and then graduated with a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Bombay University in 1983 and started work as a journalist.

She reported for the Mumbai editions of The Daily (India) and The Indian Express newspapers, and later for Business India magazine.

Her first brush with communal violence came when she covered the 1984 riots in 1984 in Bhiwandi.

Setalvad's career as a mainstream journalist was a decade long.

In 1993, in response to the Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai, she and her husband quit their regular jobs to start Communalism Combat, a monthly magazine.

According to Javed Anand (Setalvad's husband and co-founder of Communalism Combat), the decision to break from mainstream journalism to start a magazine was because it was also a platform which gave them an opportunity to intervene in ways which they couldn't have otherwise.

She is the secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), an organisation formed to advocate for the victims of 2002 Gujarat riots.

Setalvad and her husband, along with others such as Father Cedric Prakash (a catholic priest), Anil Dharker (a journalist), Alyque Padamsee, Javed Akhtar, Vijay Tendulkar and Rahul Bose (all film & theatre personalities) set up an NGO named "Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP)" on 1 April 2002.

The NGO forthwith began to litigate in various courts against the alleged complicity of the Chief Minister and government of Gujarat state in the riots that had broken out shortly before.

The book is about the 2002 Gujarat riots.

In June 2022, she was arrested by the Anti Terrorism Squad of Gujarat Police for allegedly conspiring to implicate the Gujarat government functionaries in the 2002 Gujarat Riots.

Amnesty International India has said that Setalvad's arrest is a 'direct reprisal' against human rights activists.

Protests by citizens were held in Kolkata and Bangalore against her arrest.

On 1 September 2022, the Supreme Court said that some details of the case were sketchy.

These were: no chargesheet was filed while she was in custody since last 2 months, the registration of FIR was filed the day just after the Supreme Court dismissed Zakia Jafri's case, the Gujarat High court granted a long adjournment, and there are no offences which stop the Gujarat High Court for granting the bail.

The next day, Supreme Court granted her interim bail on the ground that she was a woman, leaving the decision of regular bail to the Gujarat High Court after which she was released from jail.

The Gujarat High Court later denied her regular bail and directed her to surrender immediately, which was criticized by the Supreme Court as "totally perverse" and "contradictory" while granting her regular bail on 19 July 2023.

Zakia Jafri-CJP Special leave petition seeks a criminal trial of Narendra Modi, the then Chief Minister of Gujarat and the current Prime minister of India and 62 other politicians and government officials for alleged complicity in the Gujarat violence of 2002.

The criminal conspiracy complaint alleges that in a meeting of senior police officers and officials convened by the then Chief minister Mr Modi on 27 February 2002 following the Godhra tragedy, he issued his "let Hindus give vent to their anger" directive.

In all, there are 30 interrelated and closely interlocked allegations including

The SIT under the Chairmanship of R. K. Raghavan was originally formed to investigate nine major cases of riots in Gujarat in 2002.

Their efforts met with partial success in April 2004, when the Supreme Court of India transferred the "Best Bakery case" to the neighbouring state of Maharashtra.

At the same time, the court also overturned the recent acquittal of 21 accused and ordered that the investigation and trial be conducted afresh.

In response to the petition, the Supreme Court on 27 April 2009 ordered the Special Investigation Team (SIT) they appointed to undertake the investigation.

The SIT submitted a preliminary report in May 2010.

Chairman R. K. Raghavan submitted his comments to the report for perusal of the Supreme Court on 14 May 2010 Further investigation report was filed in November 2010.

The Supreme Court in November 2010 appointed Raju Ramachandran as amicus curiae to assist the court in this case.

The last print copy of the magazine was printed in November 2012.

Subsequently, they moved to the digital domain by starting a website, which has subsequently been inactive.

By 2013, all the cases filed by CPJ had been dismissed at three levels of the judiciary (trial court, state High Court and the Indian Supreme Court) and only one appeal is pending.

This is an appeal to the Supreme Court against a conviction handed out by the High Court to Maya Kodnani, a former minister in the government of Gujarat.

In a public discussion at the Press club in March 2017, Teesta recounted that despite coming from a family steeped in a legal heritage, she decided to pursue a career in journalism after reading a book that her father had bought her called "All the President's men".

Teesta wrote the book A Footsoldier of the Constitution: A Memoir (2017) about her experiences in Gujarat.

Her chapter, 'Being Their Target', from this book was reprinted in The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect (2021), part of the India Since the 90s series published by Tulika Books.

She has also authored the chapter When Guardians Betray:The Role of the Police in the book Gujarat:The making of a tragedy, edited by Siddharth Varadarajan and published by Penguin.