Teesta Setalvad (born 9 February 1962) is an Indian civil rights activist and journalist. She is the secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), an organisation formed to advocate for the victims of 2002 Gujarat riots. Personal life Born in 1962 into a Gujarati family, Setalvad is the daughter of Atul Setalvad, a Mumbai-based lawyer, and his wife Sita Setalvad. Her paternal grandfather was M. C. Setalvad, India's first Attorney General. Setalvad married Javed Anand, a journalist turned minority rights activist. They have two children, a daughter and a son. Career In a public discussion at the Press club in March 2017, Teesta recounted that despite coming from a family steeped in a legal heritage, she decided to pursue a career in journalism after reading a book that her father had bought her called "All the President's men". She subsequently went to college, studied law for two years, dropped out and then graduated with a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Bombay University in 1983 and started work as a journalist. She reported for the Mumbai editions of The Daily (India) and The Indian Express newspapers, and later for Business India magazine. Her first brush with communal violence came when she covered the 1984 riots in 1984 in Bhiwandi. Setalvad's career as a mainstream journalist was a decade long. In 1993, in response to the Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai, she and her husband quit their regular jobs to start Communalism Combat, a monthly magazine. According to Javed Anand (Setalvad's husband and co-founder of Communalism Combat), the decision to break from mainstream journalism to start a magazine was because it was also a platform which gave them an opportunity to intervene in ways which they couldn't have otherwise. The last print copy of the magazine was printed in November 2012. Subsequently, they moved to the digital domain by starting a website, which has subsequently been inactive. Setalvad and her husband, along with others such as Father Cedric Prakash (a catholic priest), Anil Dharker (a journalist), Alyque Padamsee, Javed Akhtar, Vijay Tendulkar and Rahul Bose (all film & theatre personalities) set up an NGO named "Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP)" on 1 April 2002. The NGO forthwith began to litigate in various courts against the alleged complicity of the Chief Minister and government of Gujarat state in the riots that had broken out shortly before. Their efforts met with partial success