VINDICATED: Setalvad sees the latest Best Bakery case judgment as the beginning of a larger issue. Photo: Gajanan Dudhalkar

A few months after Gujarat burned, President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, with chief minister Narendra Modi in tow, visited the relief camps of Ahmedabad. As Kalam moved around, meeting victims of violence, a burka-clad woman walked up to him and quietly handed him a copy of the March 2002 issue of the Mumbai-based journal, Communalism Combat.

The 150-page issue was the first detailed documentation of how violence was perpetrated across Gujarat’s 19 districts. A caricature on its last page depicted Modi as the “Caveman of the Millennium”. Modi may have fumed at the audacity of a woman who could stand out in public and point a finger at him, but there was little that he could do to stop her. Just as, two years later, despite a thumping victory in the state assembly polls, he couldn’t stop Teesta Setalvad, co-editor of Communalism Combat, from spoiling his party on the eve of a general election.

Setalvad is a one-woman army. When Gujarat was another word for despair for many in the country, the journalist-cum-social activist doggedly carried on, battling Modi’s government to get a fair trial for victims of massacres that wracked Gujarat. And this week, Setalvad succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court to transfer the trial of the Best Bakery case to Maharashtra. The Gujarat High Court had earlier acquitted all those accused of burning down 14 people in the Baroda bakery.

In the process, Setalvad also made legal history. This is the first time in the judicial history of the country that a case related to communal violence has been transferred from one state to another on the grounds that a state machinery was incapable of providing justice.

“It’s virtually one woman fighting against a stonewalling apparatus of an entire government,” says Setalvad’s co-campaigner, lyricist Javed Akhtar. “The Gujarat High Court’s judgment would have demoralised anybody lesser — it not only acquitted the accused but accused Teesta of wrongdoing. But Teesta was unmoved. Her energy and passion are a rare quality,” he says.

Setalvad has the ability to move people. Adman Alyque Padamsee, one of the founders of the Citizens for Justice and Peace — a forum Setalvad and her friends set up after the Gujarat riots — remembers his first encounter with her. “I first met Teesta when I read her article in The Indian Express about the Rajasthan drought of 1987. Her piece moved me so much that I went to Rajasthan and raised thousands of rupees in donations for the cause,” he says. “She has continued what her lawyer father Atul Setalvad started — fighting seemingly lost cases.” Back in Mumbai at her bungalow-cum-office in Juhu, the unflappable Setalvad is catching her breath before starting work on another intense round of legal battles next week. Her work is now focused on getting trials of 13 others cases related to the violence in Gujarat out of the state during another key hearing on April 21.

Her mobile phone rings every few minutes with congratulatory calls from Gujarat riot victims, journalists, friends, lawyers and well-wishers — all of whom feel she has pulled off something seemingly impossible. After all, a supposedly invincible Modi had been brought to his knees by the might of one woman.

It was tough, I agree,” says 42-year-old Setalvad, sitting out on the lawns of her sprawling bungalow, Nirant, on the Juhu Tara Road in the western suburbs of Mumbai. “I did not sleep the night before the April 12 hearing. But, I thought the facts were on our side. Unless you believe that there is hope, you can’t go through with it. I think the Supreme Court has done the Indian democracy proud.”

On Monday, when the judgment came through, Setalvad was in Ahmedabad, attending a meeting where two wanted riot-accused had sneaked in, possibly to physically harm her. Setalvad raised an alarm, forcing them to flee, and lodged a case. “One of them, Atul Vaidya, was seen during the Gulbarga Society massacre, but though he figures in the statements of witnesses, his name does not figure in the chargesheet. He continues to abscond,” says Setalvad, who is now accompanied by an armed Mumbai policeman.

She says being an NGO based in Mumbai, and not Gujarat, her group of dedicated workers have escaped direct intimidation — a clear and present danger in Modi’s Gujarat. “We are lucky that we are outside the immediate jurisdiction of the Gujarat government. I mean, look at Mallika (Sarabhai).” The reference is to a case of an alleged immigration racket that has been slammed against Sarabhai “They would use state power in different ways,” says Setalvad, a former journalist who founded Communalism Combat with husband Javed Anand to fight religious bigotry in the aftermath of the 1992 - ’93 Mumbai riots.

Her work against communalism dates back to 1983 when she met fellow journalist Anand and formed a pressure group, Journalists Against Communalism. “After the Shah Bano case judgment in 1986, and the opening of the Babri Masjid locks, we intensified the work. But, post-Mumbai riots, we felt that fighting communalism cannot be a part-time activity. So, we started Communalism Combat. People asked if there was need for a magazine exclusively writing about communalism. We felt that fighting communalism needed sustained work. The Gujarat violence proved, in a terrible way, that we were right,” says Setalvad, who spent most of the last two years first documenting the testimonies of riot victims for her magazine and the National Human Rights Commission, and then directly fighting the legal battle on behalf of the victims.

Setalvad had earlier exposed the Mumbai police’s bias against Muslims by intercepting police wireless radio frequencies and recording snatches of control room conversations. She then formed the NGO, Citizens for Justice and Peace, with prominent Mumbaikars such as Akhtar and Padamsee and collected money to fight her battle.

Winner of several awards, including the Chameli Devi Jain award for outstanding woman journalist and the Dutch Prince Claus award of 2002, Setalvad and her group had to fight complete apathy from the Modi government towards riot relief. “The Mumbai riots came as a shock. But, the extent of state complicity in Gujarat was horrifying. Even in his latest interview, Modi refuses to show any remorse for the violence. Five of his cabinet ministers were named as leaders of the violence. I think this level of state complicity wasn’t seen even during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi,” she says.

But clearly the toughest task for Setalvad was to cope emotionally with the suffering of the surviving riot victims, especially women and children. She also saw some exemplary courage in women victims who relentlessly fought for justice. “Twenty-one-year-old Bilkis lost her three-and-a-half-year-old child who was raped, like she was, before being killed. But, she hasn’t lost her courage. In Gujarat I could see that when women take a decision, they have tremendous courage to stand by it,” she says, narrating how young Reshma, an eyewitness in the Naroda-Patiya case, first saved three children of her neighbour when her own children were missing during the mayhem. “I asked myself, can I do it? For four days she didn’t know where her children were. She found them later at a relief camp,” she says.

Setalvad sees the favourable judgment in the Best Bakery case as merely the beginning of a much larger issue — an overhaul of the system. “These cases are not just about the Gujarat violence. They are also about bringing about systemic change. The April 21 hearing will also discuss the root problems plaguing the system — of witness protection, police reforms and the role of the state public prosecutors.”

Like a battle-hardened Amazon warrior, Setalvad fights on. And her supporters are convinced that the victory is hers. “We need more Teestas and less Togadias in this country,” says Padamsee fervently.