Teesta Setalvad (born 9 February 1962) is an Indian civil rights activist and journalist. She is the secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), an organisation formed to advocate for the victims of 2002 Gujarat riots.
Personal life 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.
Career 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". 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 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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. The book is about the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Allegations of witness tampering
In November 2004, Setalvad was accused of pressuring Zaheera Sheikh, the key witness in the Best Bakery case, to make certain statements, leading to the unprecedented transferral of the case outside Gujarat. In August 2005, the Supreme Court of India committee absolved her of the charges of inducement levelled against her by Zaheera and awarded a one-year jail sentence to Zaheera for perjury. In 2013 Tehelka in an undercover investigation discovered that Zaheera had been paid to alter her testimony. Tehelka recorded BJP member Madhu Srivastava, described by Tehelka as a "close associate of Narendra Modi" and Batthoo Srivastava describing how they had paid Rs 1.8 million to Zaheera.
Teesta Setalvad's former aide Rais Khan Pathan has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court alleging manipulation of evidence, which were in the form of statements of witnesses, by her in five sensitive post-Godhra riot cases.
In April 2009, the Times of India ran a story claiming that the Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up by the Supreme Court of India to investigate and expedite the Gujarat riot cases had submitted before the Court that Teesta Setalvad had cooked up cases of violence to spice up the incidents. The SIT which is headed by former CBI director, R K Raghavan has said that false witnesses were tutored to give evidence about imaginary incidents by Teesta Setalvad and other NGOs. The SIT charged her of "cooking up macabre tales of killings".
The court was told that 22 witnesses, who had submitted identical affidavits before various courts relating to riot incidents, were questioned by SIT and it was found that the witnesses had not actually witnessed the incidents and they were tutored and the affidavits were handed over to them by Setalvad. The report which was brought to the notice of the bench consisting of Justices Arijit Pasayat, P Sathasivam and Aftab Alam, noted that the much publicised case of a pregnant Muslim woman Kausar Bano being gangraped by a mob and foetus being removed with sharp weapons, was also fabricated, and false. However, Kausar Bano's husband states alleges the doctors falsified the post-mortem despite his wife's uterus having been removed from her body. The court that was trying the issue found beyond reasonable doubt that Babu Bajarangi killed Kausar Bano and her nine-month-old foetus by stabbing her in the stomach with a sword, but did not find sufficient evidence to prove that he removed the foetus from the uterus.
A day later, the Times of India published a letter from Citizens for Justice and Peace claiming that the report in question was not SIT report but a report by the Gujarat Government. The author of the Times article responded saying "My report was based on the SIT report and not any document circulated by the Gujarat government, as suggested by CJP. Whether any section of the media has the report or not is irrelevant as TOI has access to the report.
R.K. Raghavan, the chairman of the SIT criticised the report leakage, saying, "The alleged reported leaks appear to be inspired by dubious motives. I cannot confirm such claims. The act is highly condemnable". However, he refused to deny or confirm whether the leaked contents were true.Nagender Sharma, Gujarat riots witnesses not tutored: SIT, Apr 22, 2009, Hindustan Times The Supreme Court itself condemned the leaking of the SIT report as a 'betrayal of trust' but did not deny the report itself. Raghvan noted that "many incidents were cooked up, false witnesses were tutored to give evidence about imaginary incidents, and false charges levelled against the then Ahmedabad police chief P C Pandey".Guj Riots: Activist accused of 'cooking up tales' – Oneindia News. News.oneindia.in (14 April 2009). Retrieved on 18 July 2013.
Allegations of misappropriation of funds In 2013, twelve residents of the Gulbarg Society who were the victim of Gujarat riots, accused Setalvad of collecting donations in the name of riot victims but failing to use them for their benefit and sent a legal notice to her. They claimed that she had collected huge donations from national and international organisations in the name of providing financial assistance for reconstruction of houses or developing the society into a museum but it was not passed to the members of the society. They also sought to ban her organisation "Citizens for Justice and Peace" and prevent them entering the society to organise programmes. The Ahmedabad Crime Branch is conducting an inquiry into the matter.
On 13 March 2013, the official representatives including the secretary and chairman of the Gulbarg Cooperative Housing Society in a letter to the joint commissioner of Police, Crime Branch, Ahmedabad, informed him that the letter-head of the society had been misused by some residents and the claims being made by them were patently false since nothing had been parted from them. A similar letter was also released to the media. In a press release CJP and Sabrang clarified that CJP never sought nor received any money for the museum. Sabrang Trust had raised an amount of Rs 460,285 nationally and internationally from donors for the purpose of the museum and since the plan has been abandoned because of the spiralling real estate prices, the matter is between the trust and the donors which they will address when final decision is taken. All other funds, nationally and internationally raised, have been funds legitimately collected for activities that they publicly engage in. Their accounts are audited and submitted to the relevant authorities. Subsequent to the letter written by the Gulbarg Society members to the police, the police sent them a letter asking for the status quo to be maintained while investigations were in progress. Later, the Crime Branch claimed that the complaint did not have any substance and instead filed an FIR against Setalvad.
After a First Information Report was filed by the Ahmedabad police on 4 January 2014 Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand were granted interim bail. According to the judge, similar relief has been provided in the past when false allegations were raised. The bail application stated that "The FIR is a mala fide action of the Crime Branch, Ahmedabad, to intimidate a human rights defender. This is the fifth time that a false criminal case has been lodged since 2004 because of me and my organization's consistent legal support to the victims of 2002 riots ... Gulbarga cooperative housing society had been totally burnt down by politically motivated anti-social elements and 68 people had lost their lives in the massacre." It also said the accusation was brought by "powerful forces in Gujarat who wish(ed) to stymie the appeal in the Zakia Jafri case".
On finding that the Crime Branch, Ahmedabad instead of acting on his complaint had filed an FIR against Setalvad and others, the Secretary of the Gulbarg Housing Society, Firoz Gulzar Pathan moved the court complaining against Gujarat police's biased approach. The court sought a report from the Crime Branch. The Police responded by claiming that the complaint did not have any substance. This was countered by the complainant's advocate who maintained that the Crime Branch had not even bothered to question the complainant before shelving the complaint. This led the magisterial court on 15 February 2014 to direct the city crime branch to lodge an FIR and start investigation against former residents of Gulbarg Society who had made the complaint against Setalvad last year. On 28 November 2014, local court rejected pleas filed by activist Teesta Setalvad, her husband Javed Anand and their two NGOs seeking to de-freeze their bank accounts attached earlier by police in connection with the embezzlement case. On 12 February 2015, Gujarat High Court rejected Setalvad's anticipatory bail plea regarding the case. However she was given an interim protection by the Supreme Court of India and on 19 March 2015, a two-judge bench of the Court referred the issue involved in her case to a large three-judge bench.
Activism
Teesta, with her husband Javed Anand is the co-founder and co-editor of the magazine Communalism Combat which fosters communal harmony by attacking entities propounding communal violence.