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.

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 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.

Teesta wrote the book A Footsoldier of the Constitution: A Memoir (2017) about her experiences in Gujarat. Her chapter, ‘Being Their Target’, from this book was reprinted in The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect (2021), part of the India Since the 90s series published by Tulika Books.

She has also authored the chapter When Guardians Betray: The Role of the Police in the book Gujarat: The making of a tragedy, edited by Siddharth Varadarajan and published by Penguin. The book is about the 2002 Gujarat riots.