You would not want to cross swords with Teesta Setalvad, who has been called, among other things, a ‘one-woman army’, ‘a firebrand crusader’ and ‘a woman with a passion for the truth’. Single-handedly responsible for ensuring that justice is delivered, signed and sealed, even for seemingly lost causes, Setalvad has also been instrumental in notching up a first for the Indian legal system – of having got a sensitive case transferred from one state to another on the grounds that the state machinery was not equipped to mete out justice fairly.

“I always felt that the system needs to be accountable, to be transparent,” she says, at her bungalow cum office in Mumbai’s suburban Juhu, which is guarded round the clock by a posse of policemen. She means business and minces no words: “Even as a journalist, I felt that exposing the ugly truth wasn’t enough. One has to go beyond and follow up with a sustained programme. In a democracy, the fourth estate has such a valuable and powerful role to play – that of a watchdog and custodian.”

Daughter of prominent lawyer and human rights activist, Atul Setalvad, she felt strongly about social and political justice even as a child, going on to take up issues in her student days at the city’s Elphinstone College. Giving up has never been an option for the never-say-die individual who refuses to get cowed down by the most powerful forces in the land and who has an absolute conviction in what she does. “Even when Zaheera Sheikh turned hostile (in the BEST Bakery case), I felt betrayed, hurt…. It was a battle worth fighting though,” she states.

Physically attacked three times in Gujarat, Setalvad feels that is a small price to pay for the fear that the victims whom she fights for have to live with. “Fear is a strange thing. If you get paralysed by it, it leads to inaction. But it can also drive you to action. All said and done, I am voicing the concerns of victims of rapes, riots, bloody massacres – their fear is much greater. I am doing the least one can do.”

What she does best is take up cudgels on behalf of innocents trapped in the crossfire of communal violence, political vendetta and gender bias. “After witnessing the Mumbai riots of 1992-93 and a decade later, Gujarat, I wanted to test the Indian system to see whether it can ever deliver justice to victims of massacre and riots. That was the inspiration behind Citizens for Peace and Justice (CPJ). The courts don’t want to deliver and take on the bogey of communalism – it is still a taboo subject,” Setalvad comments.

Co-editor of Communalism Combat with husband, Javed Anand, Setalvad started this magazine in 1986 after they were both disturbed by the communal frenzy that was ripping the country apart: “We saw a scenario reminiscent of pre-partition – the majority and minority community feeding off each other.” The publication was thus a 24-hour effort to track the build-up of communal conflict, analyse its fallout, so that it became a tool in the hands of the activist.

She is the recipient of several awards, including the Padmashri (2007), The Nuernberg Human Rights Award (2003) and the Pax Christi internationally Peace Award (jointly with Australian artist, Eddi Kneebone). The primary conflict that plagues Indian society today, she feels is a deep and absolute divide between the past and present, the rich and poor. “Today, we have a shocking state where children in rural India are malnourished, while the top 10 per cent are getting richer. We have an entire urban middle class glorifying in consumerism, shopping, pub hopping – a fallout of our globalisation policy…. We need to ask ourselves what wealth are we generating, what kind of India is shining? Are there any values which are shining?”