Bela Bhatia

Bela Bhatia is an independent writer-reporter, researcher, human-rights lawyer and activist practicing in the District courts of Bastar division, south Chhattisgarh, India.

She has been an Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi and an Honorary Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay. Her research interests have included questions related to lives of dalits, adivasis and other marginalised communities of rural India. She has been particularly interested in understanding poverty, inequality, injustice and resistance movements. Her doctoral thesis was on 'The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar' (Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge, 2000).

She first came to Bastar in 2006 when she began studying the ongoing war between the Indian state and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and continued to visit regularly in the following years. She moved to live in Bastar in January 2015 and has been working there on an independent basis since. She was harassed by police-linked vigilante organisations for her human-rights work on several occasions in 2016–17.[1][2]

She is amongst the 121 Indians who were targeted by Israel's notorious cybersurveillance NSO Groups's Pegasus spyware in 2019 and one of the five targeted civilians globally who are part of the legal case that has challenged NSO in a US court in December, 2020.

Prior to turning to academics, she was a full-time rights activist for nearly a decade in a sangathan (collective) of landless agricultural labourers and marginal farmers in Bhiloda taluka of Sabarkantha district (Gujarat), and a peace activist in Iraq and Palestine.

She is co-author (with Mary Kawar and Mariam Shahin) of Unheard Voices: Iraqi Women on War and Sanctions (London: Change, 1992), co-editor (with Jean Drèze and Kathy Kelly) of War and Peace in the Gulf: Testimonies of the Gulf Peace Team (London: Spokesman, 2001) and co-author (with other members of the 'expert group' set up by the Planning Commission, Government of India) of 'Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas' (2 vols, 2008); the first draft of this report was written by K. Balagopal and herself.

She was born in a middle class, upper caste Punjabi Hindu family. As a step against the caste system she converted to Buddhism at Deekshabhumi, Nagpur, in 2003.

She considers herself to be a feminist, libertarian socialist and global citizen.