Speaking Out to Power

Teesta Setalvad’s memoir traces the story of the forces that shaped her, the hostility that hems her in and the personal vision that animates her

THE VILIFICATION of Teesta Setalvad has become an obsession with those looking to curry favour with today’s political bosses. Recently, Arnab Goswami’s replacement in a prime time Times Now show, for instance, chose yet another public pillorying of Setalvad in order to burnish his credentials.

No pushover, Setalvad has now decided to tell her story: the forces that shaped her, the hostile headwinds that buffeted her; the personal vision that animates her. The term “memoir” used in the title is a tad misplaced — Setalvad is rather young to assume the status of a memoirist — but it does point to a certain aggregation of difficult personal experiences in a short span of time.

The book is sure to raise the hackles of those desperate to see her chakki piso-ing (grinding the mill) in prison, as one Setalvad heckler put it. But that should not matter because the reader she seeks is the ordinary Indian. By describing herself as a “foot soldier of the Constitution”, she pits herself against those leaders and institutions she believes have colluded in its subversion.

Circumstances and choices crisscross this life, making its own patterns. The renowned legal family she was born into could have cocooned her from the world’s brutalities.butwhenyouhaveagreatgrandfather who had cross-questioned General Dyer and nailed him; a grandfather who played fair as India’s first attorney general; and a beloved father who filed a case against the Shiv Sena for its vituperative editorials during the 1992-93 Bombay riots, the normative standards set are hard to deny.

Communal violence found Setalvad early. Her journalistic career began with investigating the Antulay cement scam, but then the year 1984 swung by. The anti-sikh pogrom under Congress rule took place that November, but in March had come the Bhiwandi riots. They demonstrated how normalised the anti-muslim brutality of the Bombay Police, considered India’s finest, had become. This phenomenon was to surface time and again, whether in the blood-letting of 1992-1993, or, more emphatically, during Gujarat 2002. The trend, Setalvad argues, was not spontaneous but the result of the methodical evangelisation of the RSS/VHP.

Frustrated by the structured silences of mainstream media, Setalvad and husband Javed Anand gave up promising journalistic careers to launch their own media platform. Its title — Communalism Combat — unambiguously TEESTA SETALVAD Left Word 224 pages ` 299 reflected their activist intent.

Gujarat 2002 was to test that intent fully. When news of Godhra broke, Setalvad recalls how the phones kept ringing. Both Hindus and Muslims were fearful of what could follow. In the chapter, ‘Let Hindus Give Vent’, she dwells on that dark phase which transformed India in ways still unfathomed. By establishing the chain of circumstances linking the Godhra and post-godhra violence, she points to the complicity of the Gujarat state government and its chief minister in the pogrom that followed.

A veil of amnesia could have fallen on those events, helped by some of the world’s most sophisticated techniques of mass persuasion. Yet, for an India with a future, forgetting Gujarat is not an option, which is why the Citizens for Justice and Peace, an organisation anchored by Setalvad, Anand and a small band of committed lawyers/citizens, deserve a debt of gratitude. It has fought 68 cases from the trial court to the Supreme Court, secured 150 convictions, and continues to battle in courtrooms under hostile conditions.

This book is not without flaws, there are typos and repetitious patches. But accounts like this — speaking out to power — are rare and invaluable. Remember Zola’s J’accuse which called out France’s entrenched antisemitism over a century ago?

Pamela Philipose is a senior journalist