Teesta Setalvad

Teesta Setalvad (born 1962) is an Indian journalist and civil rights activist, secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), the group formed in 2002 to support survivors of the Gujarat violence of that year. She belongs at the edge of this record: Sikh writers have long set the Indian state's response to 1984 beside its response to Gujarat 2002, and some Sikh voices spoke up for her when she was arrested in 2022. She is a living person. The charges against her are contested and have not been tried; opinions below are labelled.

Wikipedia says she was born in Bombay and that her paternal grandfather, M. C. Setalvad, was India's first Attorney General. She worked as a journalist and in 1993 co-founded the magazine Communalism Combat with her husband, Javed Anand. Her awards include the Padma Shri (2007).

Key moments

• 2002 to 2004: through CJP she took part in litigation over the Gujarat violence, including the Best Bakery case, which the Supreme Court transferred out of Gujarat in 2004, according to Wikipedia.
• 24 June 2022: a Supreme Court bench headed by Justice A. M. Khanwilkar dismissed the petition of Zakia Jafri, widow of the former MP Ehsan Jafri, who was among 68 people killed at Gulberg Society on 28 February 2002. The petition challenged the Special Investigation Team's closure report of 8 February 2012, which found no prosecutable evidence against Narendra Modi, then Gujarat's Chief Minister, and 63 others. The Georgia Straight writes that Setalvad had helped bring the petition, and Wikipedia reports that the court said she had exploited Jafri's emotions.
• 25 June 2022: Gujarat police arrested her at her Mumbai home. She is accused of tutoring witnesses, forging documents and fabricating evidence. Her lawyer said the cases were "malicious and false"; opposition politicians and rights activists called the arrest "political vendetta", according to Al Jazeera. Wikipedia notes that the Gujarat government rejects that description.
• 2 September 2022: the Supreme Court granted her interim bail.
• 19 July 2023: the Supreme Court set aside the Gujarat High Court's order of 1 July refusing her bail and telling her to surrender. A bench of Justices B. R. Gavai, A. S. Bopanna and Dipankar Datta called the reasoning "perverse" and the order "self-contradictory". The conditions: no attempt to influence witnesses, and her passport stays surrendered. The charges include forgery, using forged documents, fabricating false evidence and criminal conspiracy under the Indian Penal Code, The Leaflet reports.

The Sikh link: writing in the Georgia Straight on 26 June 2022, the Vancouver writer Gurpreet Singh said he had known her since she visited Canada after the Gujarat violence, that she published his short fiction in a special edition marking the 25th anniversary of the 1984 killings of Sikhs, and that she had consistently criticised every government that persecuted minorities. That is his account and his opinion.

Remembered for: two decades of legal work for the survivors of Gujarat 2002, and for the way the state answered it.