Manoj Mitta

Manoj Mitta is a Delhi-based journalist who writes on law, human rights and social justice. He holds a law degree from Hyderabad, worked with The Indian Express and India Today, and is a senior editor at The Times of India.

Key work

• 2007: When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and Its Aftermath, co-written with the lawyer H.S. Phoolka, who represents victims of the November 1984 killings. The title answers Rajiv Gandhi's remark that the earth shakes when a big tree falls. A report in the Asian Pacific Post says the book is a first-person account by Phoolka, who argues that the violence was planned and not a reaction to Indira Gandhi's assassination, and who names Kamal Nath, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar. Those are Phoolka's claims, as reported; the Punjabi translation was released at Surrey in June 2008.
• 2014: The Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra, a critique of the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team's handling of the 2002 Gujarat violence. Siddharth Varadarajan, reviewing it in Outlook, called it the first book-length analysis he had read to subject the state's methods to detailed judicial scrutiny, and said it shows why the SIT's closure report is “a travesty”. That is the reviewer's judgement.
• 2023: Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India.

What he is known for. For keeping the legal record of the November 1984 killings and the official fact-finding that followed in front of the public, and for applying the same scrutiny to Gujarat in 2014. Caravan describes the first two books as works on impunity for mass violence.