Bela Bhatia

Bela Bhatia is a human-rights lawyer, researcher and writer based in Bastar, 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, and injustice; the forms that people's resistance has taken, from nonviolent movements to armed insurgency; and the nature of state response. Her doctoral thesis was on 'The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar' (Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge, 2000).

Since 2006, she has been a regular visitor to Bastar where she has been studying the ongoing war between the Indian state and the Communist Party of India (Maoist). She moved to live in Bastar in January 2015 and has been working there on an independent basis since. She has been harassed by police-linked vigilante organisations on several occasions in 2016-17.[1][2]

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