Indian court rules for activ ist
In the second such decision, a judge knocks down attempt to stifle Greenpeace.
MUMBAI, India — Ruling that a democracy can’t muzzle dissent, an Indian court on Thursday struck down a travel ban against a Greenpeace activist who has criticized the government’s aggressive pursuit of coalbased energy projects.
It was the second significant legal victory this year for the Indian branch of Greenpeace after the same court ruled in January that the government could not block the environmental group from receiving foreign funding for its domestic advocacy work.
In both decisions, the Delhi High Court in the capital dismissed the government’s claims that Greenpeace and other nongovernmental organizations were acting against “national interests” by opposing its energy policies, which rely heavily on coal-powered thermal plants.
“The state may not accept the views of the civil rights activists, but that by itself cannot be a good enough reason to do away with dissent,” Judge Rajiv Shakdher wrote in the ruling Thursday. Shakdher also ruled in favor of Greenpeace in the earlier case.
The activist, Priya Pillai, was stopped at the New Delhi airport in January while attempting to travel to London to speak to British lawmakers about allegations of human rights violations by Essar, a Britain-registered energy company that has proposed building a coal mine in the Mahan forest in central India.
Greenpeace and other groups say the project would destroy the livelihoods of thousands of villagers and a wildlife corridor that is home to scores of species.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said he supports environmental protection, but his main priority is economic development. To bring electricity to the hundreds of millions of Indians who still don’t have it, Modi’s government plans to triple the capacity of coal-fired power plants by 2020.
In court, government lawyers said Pillai’s trip to London would have harmed India’s image and jeopardized Indo-British relations. In his ruling, Shakdher described that claim as “completely untenable.”
“It’s a big, big victory — not just for Greenpeace and for me personally, but for the people of this country who dare to have a different view on development,” Pillai said in an interview.
India bills itself as the world’s biggest democracy, but its authorities have come under fire recently for efforts aimed at stifling speech or behavior that they deem inappropriate.
Authorities in Mumbai, the second-largest city, have banned the sale or possession of beef in the surrounding state, deeming it an affront to Hinduism, which regards the cow as sacred.
Several films have been censored or banned, including “India’s Daughter,” a BBC documentary about a notorious 2012 gang rape and murder in New Delhi.