Journalist and activist Batuk Vora died Tuesday morning, according to an Indo-Asian News Service report.

Vora, 74, was suffering from liver cancer.

Vora was a former staffer of India Abroad, which is owned by rediff.com.
 
Vora was a leading critic of the Gujarat government following the communal violence there in 2002.
 
Vora began his career as a journalist in 1949-50, working with the Mumbai-based Gujarati journals, Jay Gujarat and Mashal.

Turning to Marxism, Vora began working for the railway employees' union in his hometown of Palitana in Saurashtra. He also successfully contested assembly polls from there in the 1950s as a candidate of the Communist Party of India.

Giving up politics, he turned to journalism in the 1960s and wrote, among others, for the CPI publication, New Age.

He wrote from many countries in Europe, the erstwhile USSR and China.

While in the US, he was the India Abroad correspondent in San Francisco and later took charge of California edition. He later contributed to IANS.

 In 1998, he wrote America... America, based on his experience as a journalist in the US.

According to his wishes, his body has been donated to a medical college, IANS reported.

He is survived by a wife and a son.