The recent strictures passed by the Supreme Court on the lawyer Teesta Setalvad raise a whole gamut of questions. Setalvad had raised the issue that the delay in courts’ handling of cases relating to the Gujarat riots mounted to an act of indifference and injustice. The Court in response noted a case of impropriety marked with impatience and condemned her for it.

There was a great sense of relief, even euphoria, at the Supreme Court’s response. The right felt Setalvad had no right to speak for the victims as she was not representative of them. It saw Setalvad’s protest as an act of arrogation. Better behaved activists also exuded an ‘I told you feeling’ about one of their more visible contemporaries.

Today activism is a career; a style that prefers negotiation to the scream. Many activists and journalists find Setalvad ‘screechy, loud, hysterical,’ the kind of symptoms which one associated with the ammonia-snuffing hysteric on whom the Charcots and Freuds built their discipline. When activism is a form of consultancy, one does not want to take it to the streets. Today you don’t want to deal with the obsessive behaviour of someone in the perpetual act of washing. It is like a tic that is forever distracting.

Yes, Teesta Setalvad is a difficult person. I remember when professor J.S. Bandukwala talked of forgiveness, she let loose the Madam Defarge act. She plays the perpetual Gadfly. She screams, screams on behalf of the victims, because the scream is the only answer to the silence of Gujarat. The communication theorist Colin Cherry once described noise as unwelcome music. Setalvad’s scream is doubly unwelcome. But it is an act of witness.

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