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India’s Supreme Court has granted bail to a leading activist, two months after she was arrested on allegations she faked documents about riots in 2002.
Teesta Setalvad has long fought for victims of the violence in Gujarat state and accuses PM Narendra Modi, who was then chief minister, of complicity.
She was arrested in June on charges of “forgery and fabricating evidence” in a riots case.
Her arrest was widely condemned by global rights groups.
It also sparked protests – with critics accusing Mr Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of targeting Ms Setalvad for her work.
Since 2003, Ms Setalvad, a human rights lawyer, has been accused in at least seven cases – allegations range from violating India’s foreign exchange rules and embezzling funds raised from riot victims to coaching witnesses in the trials.
The 2002 riots in Gujarat were among India’s worst outbreaks of violence in decades.
The state’s BJP government and Mr Modi were accused of not doing enough to bring the violence under control – an allegation he has consistently denied.
In June, the Supreme Court cleared him of complicity after ruling that there was no evidence against him.
Two days later, police arrested Ms Setalvad after registering a fresh case of forgery and criminal conspiracy against her.
On Friday, the Supreme Court said that the high court would still take a call on her bail plea but granted her interim bail so she could be freed.
Who is Teesta Setalvad?
Ms Setalvad runs Citizen for Justice and Peace – a non-profit organisation formed in the aftermath of the 2002 violence to provide legal aid to victims of crimes like religious riots and terrorism.
Since it’s inception, the organisation has secured 120 convictions in 68 cases involving nine major riot incidents – a record for convictions for any religious riot in India.
But Ms Setalvad says she has been routinely targeted for her work. Her house and office were raided a number of times, her bank accounts were frozen on many occasions and she was relentlessly vilified and threatened on social media.
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She told the BBC’s Soutik Biswas in 2015 that she had to spend a lot of her time defending herself.
One of her most high-profile cases has been about a massacre at a Muslim housing complex in the state’s main city of Ahmedabad in which a former MP Ehsan Jafri and 68 others were killed by a mob.
In 2013, a trial court in Gujarat ruled that there was not enough evidence to prosecute Mr Modi in connection with the case.
But Ms Setalvad, who’s been representing the MP’s widow Zakia Jafri, had petitioned the top court seeking a fresh investigation into the “larger conspiracy” behind the violence and had accused the investigators of working to “protect” conspirators.
While dismissing her plea on 24 June, the Supreme Court said that the people who accused Mr Modi of not doing enough had “exploited the emotions of Zakia Jafri” and “kept pursuing the case intriguingly for the last 16 years… to keep the pot boiling, obviously, for ulterior design”.
“As a matter of fact, all those involved in such abuse of process need to be in the dock and proceeded within accordance with law,” the three-judge bench said.
Two days later, Home Minister Amit Shah, who is a close aide of the prime minister, also accused Ms Setalvad of giving baseless information to the police to tarnish Mr Modi’s image.
Hours later, she was arrested.
Her arrest set off a wave of outrage, with journalists, activists and opposition politicians calling it the latest attempt by the government to stifle dissent.
Global rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International also condemned her arrest.
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